One of the kookiest JFK assassination conspiracy theories (and just to set the record straight, I don’t believe for a second that Oswald was the lone gunman, but we’ll save my more rational personal theories for another day, maybe.) that has floated around for some time is that Kennedy was killed because he was asking too many questions about aliens, Roswell, New Mexico and Area 51, etc. I think this may have even been touched on in an episode of the X-Files.
With that said, earlier today Matt Drudge linked to an AOL article by Lee Speigel on his website that pushes this hilariously retarded theory forward a bit, without coming right out and saying it. I mean, of course JFK asked to see the alien/UFO files…so has every other person who’s ever been president, probably, but they didn’t have their freaking heads blown off in a public square for doing it! Wouldn’t you wanna take a look at those files? Hell, that’d be the first thing I’d do upon taking office!
While researching materials for his new book, “A Celebration of Freedom: JFK and the New Frontier” (Wasteland Press), Atlanta, Ga., history teacher William Lester used the Freedom of Information Act to get some previously classified documents.
Two of them were written by Kennedy on the same date, Nov. 12, 1963 — 10 days before his assassination. One was to the CIA director, asking for UFO files (See JFK Doc 2); the other was to the NASA administrator, with Kennedy expressing a desire for cooperation with the former Soviet Union on mutual outer space activities (See JFK Doc 3).
“One of his concerns was that a lot of these UFOs were being seen over the Soviet Union and he was very concerned that the Soviets might misinterpret these UFOs as U.S. aggression, believing that it was some of our technology,” Lester told AOL News.
“I think this is one of the reasons why he wanted to get his hands on this information and get it away from the jurisdiction of NASA so he could say to the Soviets, ‘Look, that’s not us, we’re not doing it, we’re not being provocative. In fact, just to show you that it’s not us, what do you think about us working together on the exploration of space?'” Lester added.
My point in bringing all of this up is merely to illustrate how Drudge is a master at manipulating his frothing, far-right audience. This sort of stuff is red meat for their paranoid fantasies — he links to material like this knowing full-well that it stokes their fires, and you can bet they’ll at least try to find some way to link Obama to it, though he was but an infant at the time all of this went down. Sound absurd? Well, of course it does to any thinking person — but would you really be all that surprised if it started popping up all over the place on conservative blogs and radio shows?
Which gets me to the magic of Drudge: Using a 16 year-old link blog that hasn’t undergone a redesign in its history, to my knowledge anyway, the guy features skillfully crafted, often sensational, headlines and placement that — along with Fox News — fuels the right-wing message machine. And his influence is growing — in March of this year, Drudge’s site registered over 933,000,000 pageviews, a new record — which should help propel the next chapter in insane Obama conspiracy theories forward: That the black president and his liberal cohorts may be possessed by Satan.
So the next time you’re left scratching your head wondering, “How the hell did this country descend so rapidly into a full-blown state of Idiocracy?“, you can basically thank Matt Drudge.