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Feature
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Despite dwindling time and numbers, the anti-Clinton movement won't say die.
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Feature
The "strange magic" of JFK Jr.
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By Joan Walsh
[07/23/99]

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More disturbing by far was the inability of certain "conservative" commentators to suppress their contempt for his stricken family, even while family members were grieving their loss.

For some important figures on the right, hatred of the Kennedys seems to be a chronic and unmanageable psychosis. It is no doubt linked with their own feelings of inadequacy and frustration, as well as with their resentment of a legend that endowed public service and liberal politics with glamour and style.

Only such a peculiar form of emotional illness can account for the venom spat out by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and John Podhoretz, two prominent right-wing pundits who expressed to their offline audiences what others of their ilk were posting on the Internet.

Joe Conason Joe Conason's column appears in Salon News every other Tuesday. + Biography + Archives

For normal people of any political persuasion, simple dignity and a degree of self-respect normally preclude indecent behavior at anybody's funeral. But Limbaugh and Podhoretz, could not restrain themselves long enough to even let the Kennedys bury their dead.

While he complained repeatedly that the media were devoting too much attention to the Kennedy story, Limbaugh himself couldn't stay away, although later he may have wished he had. To him, the massive and reverent coverage indicated a conspiracy by the liberal-dominated broadcasting and publishing industries.

"JFK Jr. was who he was by virtue of his family name and the way the media is just flat-out in love with this family," Limbaugh whined on July 19. "It is ideological, it's sycophantic." He admitted that neither he nor anyone he knew had anything critical to say about the deceased, but then couldn't keep himself from adding, "To listen to the networks, to listen to the media cover this, John F. Kennedy Jr. could walk on water, he just couldn't fly over it."

Having delivered this gross witticism, Limbaugh then dwelled at length on what he imagined to have been the physical fate of Kennedy, his wife and his sister-in-law. "I figured out how hard this plane must have hit the water ... and in a situation like that, you know what seat belts do? They keep you in the seat but they also, they act, I mean, they're not much different than knives in a situation like that. So, what is going to be found here is not pleasant to ponder. That's why they're going to have trouble here in finding anything that is any sizable representative [of the bodies]."

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