It’s funny how context can reverse things.
Imagine I tell you, a person gets a rifle, goes into a building, and shoots someone out of the window.
Good or bad?
Was it a police sniper killing a hostage taker who was killing innocent people, or a racist shooting innocent people he hated?
Imagine the following.
I tell you about a US president, who the intelligence community largely distrusts with the security of our nation.
This president has ‘back-channel’ communications with enemy foreign leaders to bypass his own government.
He makes a secret deal with an enemy not to invade their ally, and then lies about it to the American people and the world.
He sends trusted friends to meet with enemy leaders to secretly explore deals.
He tweets how much he hates the intelligence agencies and wants to dismantle them.
In one case, I largely just described donald trump — doing even a bit more than we know. A strong case for opposing him and siding with the intelligence agencies for the good of the country.
But actually I was describing JFK, substituting one word “tweets” for “privately remarked”.
But the context is quite different. In that case we had a president actually fighting for the country and for peace against malevolent intelligence agencies.
(He regularly used trusted reporters and other friends for secret exchanges directly with Kruschev, he secretly promised not to invade Cuba while denying it, he had two envoys secretly meeting with Castro to explore a possible restoration of relations — one was meeting with Castro when news of the assassination arrived to Castro.)
I think we’re right and the right-wing is wrong.
But it’s interesting to note how similar some things can appear on the surface — how wrongly they did not trust Kennedy but had similar concerns — while things are actually so different. In one case, we had a president trying to get around a cold war machine pushing both sides toward nuclear annihilation needlessly while remaining the leader of the free world.
In the other we have a sociopath aided by an adversary trying to alter our election who has shown no morals or values making deals there’s every reason to expect are bad for our country.
Who is opposing a very different intelligence community from the disastrous CIA in Kennedy’s era, one that instead is legitimately protecting the country.