Hugh Hewitt represents an almost unique challenge to those of us who try to traffic in the truth, nearly unique amongst the bottom feeding defenders of Trump, Hewitt is intelligent enough to read a speech written by Robert Kennedy, dissect and distort his words enough to fool the idiots who read him and are willing to suspend disbelief at his assertion that Bobby Kennedy would, if he were still alive, be doing anything but flaying Trump in every single phrase that he utters.
In his Washington Post Column Hewlitt castigates Democrats wrongly for the societal upheavals unleashed by generational changing of the guard in the late 1960s and, slightly less wrongly, on the scourge of the Vietnam war (which Bobby sought desperately to end)... even though he some how manages to lay the combat dead in 1970 at the Democrats feet... before he gets to his meat.
Praising Bobby’s speech in Indianapolis on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, as we all should, Hewlitt fails to grasp or, chooses not to comprehend, as doing so would spoil his attempt to weaponize the speech, is that Kennedy was pleading that his largely black audience show an almost un-human degree of forbearance in response to the naked white racism that killed Dr. King.
Hewitt recasts that plea, rooted in Kennedy’s understanding of the moment and the historical forces that led to it, as a request for a cloud of tolerance to envelope both sides of the racist divide, as Hewitt undoubtedly believes that both sides have “very fine people” on their teams, and that that opium cloud of bullshit be allowed also to enshroud der leader Trump.
He scribbles:
“Nevertheless, Kennedy’s speech was a heartfelt, deeply moving appeal for healing and love among fellow citizens. Kennedy, who himself was killed two months later, saw all that had occurred, all that loomed and tried to stop it. Read his speech from that night in Indianapolis. Better yet, listen to it.
Then ask if you heard anything approaching that this past week from any corner of the Democratic Party. Kennedy was running for president as a Democrat, but he was very much running against President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Vietnam War. Still, he did not use the tragedy of King’s murder to score points. He did not demonize his opponents in the field, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, or his presumptive opponent in the fall, Richard Nixon. He didn’t just speak to Democrats or some small slice of Democrats whom he considered “his base.” Kennedy spoke to all Americans, especially the deeply traumatized black community, and urged peace and love and healing.
The aftermath of the El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, mass murders, both rooted in the malaise and bigotry of our online age on both the fringe left and right, did not summon forth a Kennedy. Every single Democrat missed his or her opportunity to step up, as RFK did, and instead stepped in it, as I noted in Friday’s Post “Pundit Power Rankings."
Indeed, almost all of the Democrats chose in this week following a weekend of horrors to pivot their main message of the campaign trail from “Trump and Russia” to “Trump and racism.” At least five of the Democratic candidates went so far as to brand President Trump as a white supremacist.”
Time, space and the call of the time clock preclude me from unraveling all the lies and half truths contained in those paras, and in the rest of Hewitt’s agitprop, which my readers are quite capable of doing on their own in the comments, so I will rely on Joe Kennedy III’s response to speak for me:
“On the night the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, Robert F. Kennedy climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck in Indianapolis and addressed a largely African American crowd that had yet to hear the news. Stricken and vulnerable, hurting and heartbroken, my grandfather offered them what he could. Not a magic wand to heal all wounds, but some humanity to hold on to, from a man who knew what it meant to ache.
While riots and violence shook the rest of the country in the hours that followed, Indianapolis stayed calm.
That conservative Post commentator Hugh Hewitt recently manipulated that moment in his column to take a political shot against the Democratic Party is grotesque.
But before we get back to my grandfather, there are a few other things Hewitt got wrong. First, that a president who keeps black and brown children in cages, terrorizes black and brown families with military-style raids and tries to block black and brown voices from voting can be called anything other than racist.”
“Not a magic wand to heal all wounds” Hewitt, but a call to the humanity and goodness that still lived in the people that he spoke to that night, a humanity and goodness long estranged from Trump, the GOP, and yourself.
Bobby’s speech: