Monday, May 11, 2009

Assassination: Six Degrees of Separation from David Feherty's Remarks

Open Letter to Dallas Morning News:


By Aggie Yeakel, editorial writer and former Odessa, Texas (Ector County) teacher

This letter is a grim reminder to you that Dallas,TX holds the egregious distinction of being the city that hosted the first Presidential assassination since 1901(McKinley) which took the life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963. That this happened in Dallas was no accident. The hatred and vitriol that was bubbling just beneath the surface of the City of Hate ( in the 60's) was palpable. President Kennedy was advised to reconsider this trip and avoid Dallas where the right wing hate mongers had both the power and oil money to carry out their verbal assaults.
Fast forward to 2009, in their April issue, D Magazine published an article entitled "President George W. Bush Comes Home (Yo, Dubya)" which included a death threat proposal penned by David Feherty, a golf analyst for CBS Sports. When it comes to political discourse. Ferhery not only rears his ultra right wing side in his article welcoming George W to Preston Hollow, but projects a much darker side of his allegiance to the 43rd President."From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this though, despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death." suggests Feherty in his disdain for Speaker Pelosi.
On Sunday, April 10, CBS Sports published a lame, lapdog apology by Feherty who indicated his article was written as a "joke", albeit a poor one, and apologized to Speaker, Nancy Pelosi and Senate Leader, Senator Reid. Okay then, in the spirit of this so called jocular piece describing how any good soldier can gun down the 3rd in line for the Presidency, let's play Six Degrees of Separation. No, not with Kevin Bacon, but with assassinations, the real kind, David, the kind that attempt to destroy democracy, hope and political decency.
1. The article in question, " appeared in D Magazine which drew the attention of Media Matters for printing the tongue (or was it gun) in cheek article by David Feherty. Put another way, that would be an assassination.
2. D Magazine is a bi-monthly publication which is co-founded by Dirk Allison and Ray Lee Hunt, the son of H.L. Hunt.
3. David Feherty, in the same article, describes his chummy connection to "George 1"(Former President George Herbert Walker Bush) and suggests that now George W and Laura live in the Preston Hollow zip code, (where Feherty also has a residence) they could get together via Jim Nance, CBS Sports Commentator.
4. The alliance of former President George H Bush and the Hunt family go way back. The privately-held Hunt Oil Company(that would be Ray's company) is one of the big money Texas donors behind the Bush family political empire," according to SourceWatch. A Hunt subsidiary, Hunt Oil Co. of the Kurdistan Region , had big plans in 2007, with the blessing of the Bush Administration, to enter into a production-sharing contract with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) for petroleum exploration in northern Iraq, the first such deal since the Kurds passed their own oil and gas law in northern Iraq. This is now under investigation.
5. Ray Lee Hunt's, Daddy, H.L. Hunt had strong connections to the Conspiracy Theory of the Assassination (which the Warren Commission conveniently left out) . The dirty little secret in Dallas oil baron circles is that anyone actually did believe that Lee H. Oswald acted as the lone gunman. Hunt's top aides often heard him say that America would be "much better off without Kennedy". On one occasion Hunt reportedly expressed his desire to see JFK shot . But who needs an FBI investigation and charges when it comes to Texas -approved assassination threats of our nations' leaders? That would be an oxymoron.
6. The Secret Service gave only lip service to the current of hate for JFK in Dallas in 1963 and later dismissed the threats as not a serious threat. Presidential historians tells us that President Kennedy would have easily won his second term as our President had he not been gunned down in Dealey Plaza. Put another way, that would be assassination.
Hatred for President Obama, Speaker, Pelosi and Senate Leader, Harry Reid is, once again, fomenting along the Metroplex as it did in 1962-63. Assassination plots with oil field ambitions and cash to fund them are born, not only in the extremist fox holes of the Middle East, but in the grassy knolls of the Preston Hollows of our world as well. Make no mistake about that. Feherty's crime is serving as the carnival barker and he should be held accountable; however the real danger lurks where greed, oil and power simultaneously rule. Having the audacity to crimp their Middle East oil profiteering or cross their ideological views has proved to be life threatening.
Looking back, I was just a college freshman attending Friday classes on the campus of Illinois State University on that sunny, fall day in November of 1963, when the news came over the radio that our President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was fatally shot in the head by an assassin. On that tragic day, the bullet hole that ripped the President's brain wide open also ripped a hole in the fabric of our democracy that remains today.
So there we have it: Six Degrees of Separation: From H.L. Hunt's desire to see JFK dead, to his son as co-founder of D Magazine, and CEO of Hunt Oil, to the Hunt family connection to the Bush political hierarchy, to Preston Hollow, to the Right Winger of Northern Ireland, Feherty's rants of wishing Speaker Pelosi dead. Clearly, in the past or present climate of hate in Dallas, TX, there is no way of explaining away an idle threat or fantasy no matter how many degrees of separation there are. History knows better.

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