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The America of the JFK Era Died with Him

by Rush Limbaugh - Oct 24,2014

RUSH: Friendship, Wisconsin, with Randy. Great to have you, sir. Welcome. You’re up first.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush, thanks for taking my call. I’ve been a longtime listener, not by choice, but for the last three years I don’t miss a show.

RUSH: Not by choice, but now you’re hooked. Well, we’ll take it.

CALLER: Okay. Great. My question for you is, I’d like to know when you think America became so liberal. I mean, I can remember as a child the Kennedy days. It was: Don’t ask what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And it just seems to have gone totally 180 on it, you know, and I’d like to know what you think about that.

RUSH: It’s a great question. You have called the right place for the answer. Now, there have always been liberals. There have always been communists in America. There used to be something called the House Un-American Activities Committee, which hunted them down. There were communists in Hollywood that were blacklisted and so forth. But your question, when did the nation shift.

CALLER: Yes.


RUSH: And you mentioned Kennedy. I guarantee you what brought this about, what reversed the trend, was the assassination of JFK.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: That is when the Democrat — because there isn’t a Democrat today who would, in inauguration speech or a campaign speech, would say what JFK said in his speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do.” There’s not a Democrat alive who would —

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: — think it would be smart to say that. There’s not a Democrat alive, because now it is precisely, “Demand what your country owes you because of how it has screwed you,” is the mantra. Now, the reason for the turn with the Kennedy assassination is theoretical, but I think it all has to do with the fact that he was assassinated in Dallas. Dallas was supposedly a hotbed of radical conservatism, the John Birch Society and all these mean-spirited, extremist racist War on Women type conservative Neanderthals.

And then the left found out that it was a communist that killed JFK. It was not the conservative Republicans in conservative Texas. A communist. Lee Harvey Oswald came back from Moscow. I think that was culture shock for them and it was something they didn’t understand. “Wait a minute. Not quite our buddies, but the communists?”

They had much more in common with Soviet communism than they did with American conservatism, and they had themselves believing for the longest time, and even today you’ll see in news anniversaries of JFK that it was conservatives in Dallas that did it. But the fact is the communists, somebody that Oswald was working for, and I think it provided a culture shock. That’s the moment in time when the Democrat Party shifted away from what Kennedy stood for.