Whoa, Nellie!

I doubt there's anyone anywhere who thinks that Newsmax is a legitimate news source. It's not that they're a rabidly right-wing website and news service but that they're rather fiercely committed to printing whatever will get right-wingers fired up enough to send money. For a long time, they were flogging the idea that it was an absolute certainty that Hillary Clinton has a firm plan to run for president in 2004 and were soliciting donations to stop her. Lately, they've been edging towards the idea that she now realizes she's so unpopular that she can't win. So if she doesn't run, that will be the reason. (Uh, it couldn't be that she never planned to run?)

Anyway, they recently posted this "news" story that flows from an interview on Larry King Live the other night…

For all the coverage generated by the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination this past weekend, the media managed to miss the only genuine news to emerge from the commemoration. Nellie Connally, wife of former Texas Gov. John Connally and the only person still alive who rode in the presidential death limousine, publicly disputed for the first time the Warren Commission's "magic bullet" theory, a scenario absolutely essential to its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was Kennedy's lone assassin.

They're wrong about this being the first time she's said this. She's said it hundreds of times. The Newsmax piece says it's the first time she said it publicly but also quotes her as saying she said it to the Warren Commission. Her statements there and elsewhere are quoted in around 95% of all the books that seek to refute the official findings, and that's a lot of books. Here's a link to the text of a 1998 interview in Texas Monthly where she not only says it but says that she's never wavered from her view. I think she's incorrect about the second shot but it certainly is not news that she believes that.

It is also kinda dishonest for them to pull that one item out of the interview (here's the whole transcript) and not cite that she also said that she was positive there were exactly three shots and that all three came from behind. Of the thousands of conspiracy theories that have been tossed out since 11/22/63, I'm not sure there are any that believe there were three from behind, that the second hit Connally and that the third hit Kennedy only. That description does not match the physical evidence. In any case, Nellie Connally may firmly believe the "single bullet theory" isn't right but she also firmly believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. She's wrong about some part of it, and Newsmax is wrong to quote only the part that supports their agenda. They do a lot of this.