After having written that you shouldn't trust what comes out of Hollywood, I have to admit that something out of there did influence me quite a bit. But perhaps not in the way that was intended.
I've written about that movie before---it was Oliver Stone's JFK.
There was a short clip of that movie, in which President Kennedy is giving a speech. It was the American University speech just a few months before the assassination. It was hailed as a great speech by none other than Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader at that time. It was a dovish speech that enraged the militarists so much so that they wanted to kill Kennedy and start a war---according to Stone. But this wasn't exactly the thing that got me fired up so much. It was one of them, however. But even more so than this, it was the nature of its tone that permeated the entire movie. One insult and slander after another. The movie was full of them.
It was this same kind of slander that we witness today during the budget talks. The left dehumanizes and delegitimizes those with which they have a disagreement. Yet, the blame others that they disagree with as being hateful.
So, Oliver Stone uses the clip, but he doesn't even bother to study it. For it is this kind of attitude that Kennedy is addressing. If Stone and the far left really wanted peace and understanding, why use the kind of rhetoric that they use on their opponents?
It is worth studying Kennedy's speech. Here it is in its entirety. Ask yourself this, aren't we, meaning the two political parties in the US, in the same kind of situation that existed between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War? And also: wouldn't it be wise to tone down the rhetoric before it gets out of hand?
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