My Debate with a Chomskyite

[James DiEugenio]

I accepted an invite from Bob Buzzanco who said our documentary was full of crap since we somehow missed what Chomsky said about JFK and Vietnam.

So as not to appear like a two faced chicken, I accepted his debate challenge.   Except at a neutral site, Aaron Good's American Exception.

Here is the result.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-34-jfk-64644037

 

[James DiEugenio]

BTW, Aaron Good just told me that almost all the comments he gets on this debate are anti Buzzanco.

They say he came off kind of uninformed about the JFK case and also kind of arrogant.

Let me add:  Many years ago when Newman, Ellsberg and Scott were speaking at Harvard, they invited Chomsky to come on.

At that time he was at MIT.  And  his apartment was  close to the locale.

He did not show.

[Micah Mileto]

JFK being a great man is now a conspiracy theory in and of itself. Who could have been more progressive if they were President, under the circumstances? Depends on how much you think JFK was in charge of everything. People always assume the worst about everybody instead of being skeptical.

[Benjamin Cole]

2 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

BTW, Aaron Good just told me that almost all the comments he gets on this debate are anti Buzzanco.

They say he came off kind of uninformed about the JFK case and also kind of arrogant.

Let me add:  Many years ago when Newman, Ellsberg and Scott were speaking at Harvard, they invited Chomsky to come on.

At that time he was at MIT.  And  his apartment was  close to the locale.

He did not show.

How Jim D. finds the patience to deal with certain elements of the anti-JFK world is beyond me. 

 

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

LOL, sometimes it gets beyond me also.

This one was really painful.

[W. Tracy Parnell]

On 4/6/2022 at 7:08 PM, James DiEugenio said:

I accepted an invite from Bob Buzzanco

IMO, Buzzanco was effective when debating Jim D's theory that JFKs foreign policy decisions led to his assassination. He was less so on specific assassination matters which he admitted he knew little about. 

[James DiEugenio]

Oliver just heard this debate.

He called me up and was  very thankful and flattering. He thought I did so well.

He said he could not have been prouder of me.

I don't know for sure, as  I have not listened to it yet.

[Ron Bulman]

8:20, what bullshit he spews about JFK and civil rights.  

[James DiEugenio]

Well, see all of those professional leftists are like this.

If you drink the Kool Aid on one aspect, you drink it on another one.

In my wrap up, I address this one.

[James DiEugenio]

A note I got from a debate listener, Tom Gram, who writes for Greg Parker's online zine

Good Morning Jim, 

 

Great job wiping the floor with Buzzanco. JFK: Destiny Betrayed is the best JFK documentary ever made, and I’m not just saying that. It’s the truth, and you genuinely blew Buzzanco out of the water. His fast-talking, condescending bullshit made me a bit nervous at first, but you parried everything he said on foreign policy and then some, and just torched him when it came to discussing the actual case. I don’t get how he can argue against conspiracy from a position of complete ignorance, which he admitted, but hell you have to give him credit for having the balls to let you make an ass out of him on the air. 

 

LOL, Does it get better than that?

 

[Benjamin Cole]

"Well, see all of those professional leftists are like this."---J. DiEugenio

This a deeply concerning aspect of what passes for the American Left. 

Sometimes the deep connections between "left-wing" media and the National Security-Deep State are right out in the open, as when CNN, MSNBC et al elect to make their commentators a platoon of former national security-intel guys. 

Other times the leftists insist on framing every event and issue as defined by "white supremacy," which means JFK was a white supremacist.  ID politics (but never class politics) is the controlling narrative. 

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cia-liberal-media-outlets-the-real-anthony-fauci/

Dick Russell catalogs the growing links between the CIA and "liberal" media. 

This co-opting of liberal media led to the dumbfounding reaction in "left wing" circles to Jim D's and Oliver Stone's masterwork on the JFKA. 

To my knowledge, not a single left-wing media outlet actually reviewed the JFK Revisited film. That is, reviewed the film's contents against what could be verified, and what made sense, or what may be a justified alternative explanation to something presented in the film. Mostly, the left-wingers just bashed the film on cosmetics, and even the rare positive review was admittedly rather thin (though welcome). 

The crime of it is JFK: Revisited deserves a deep and trenchant, tough but fair, review of the type The New Yorker might have done 50 years ago (on some other topic, the JFKA has always been radioactive). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Sandy Larsen]

Yes, you did do a great job in this debate Jim. I loved the way Buzzanco tried to minimize much of what you said -- backed by ARRB documents -- by calling it "window dressing"... or whatever it is he called it. (I forget because I listened to the debate days ago.) Yeah right, that's a compelling comeback! LOL, reminds me of the way McAdams would minimize  as "factoids" things he had no answers for.

I also had to laugh when Buzzanco tried to emphasize how he got much of his information by digging through oodles of documents. If by "documents" he means contemporary and popular history books, yeah I can buy that. But what I think he was doing was trying to bring himself up to Jim's level of studying source documents. Trying to get listeners of the debate to believe  he'd done that. But how can he possibly be aware of the true facts when he hasn't even studied the ARRB released documents?

Jim always responded confidently and kept Buzzanco on the defensive. Well done, Jim.

Edited April 16, 2022 by Sandy Larsen

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks Sandy.  And also I was not peddling any of my books as he was.  He actually held his book up to plug it.

[James DiEugenio]

These guys are shameless.

I just learned from Aaron Good the following:

Buzzanco was given an audio track of the debate. 

He altered that track.  According to Aaron, he added something like a 10-15 minute intro attacking "JFK assassinologists".

Whew, talk about desperation.  He must not want the very few listeners to his show to see how poorly he did against me.

I guess that is kind of a backhanded compliment.

[David G. Healy]

On 4/14/2022 at 12:26 PM, James DiEugenio said:

These guys are shameless.

I just learned from Aaron Good the following:

Buzzanco was given an audio track of the debate. 

He altered that track.  According to Aaron, he added something like a 10-15 minute intro attacking "JFK assassinologists".

Whew, talk about desperation.  He must not want the very few listeners to his show to see how poorly he did against me.

I guess that is kind of a backhanded compliment.

all these classic deeeee-bators on the nutter side are NOT about case evidence, it's  all about the microphone and EGO...