Joel Surnow is no John Milton, but the producer of "24", America's favorite torture show, seems to be taking a good whack at a favorite liberal icon, or rather iconostasis, the Kennedys. Here's Alternet, waxing wroth:

Outraged Citizens Campaign Forces History Channel to Rethink Miniseries About the Kennedys

Robert Greenwald launches growing campaign that calls historically revisionist series backed by a producer with ties to Roger Ailes, "right-wing character assassination." Media observers are abuzz with talk of a History Channel mini-series called "The Kennedys." While the scripts for the eight-part show, slated to air in 2011, are still unfinished, that hasn't stopped 40,000 people from signing a petition calling the series "right-wing character assassination" and "politically motivated fiction."

One would kinda like to know who the 40,000 "outraged citizens" are, and how they got mobilized. Greenwald, a documentary filmmaker and stalwart committed Democrat, seems to have started the ball rolling.

Apparently Greenwald got hold of the scripts somehow; they include a scene of Mattress Jack boinking somebody -- not Jackie, apparently; someone named Judy -- in a swimming pool:

.... when a Secret Service agent comes to deliver time-sensitive information from McGeorge Bundy, his security advisor, the president doesn't stop what he's doing as the agent delivers the news.

I don't know anything at all about Judy, but I remember McGeorge Bundy. I have to think that Jacko made the right choice.

Apparently there's also a scene in which Jack mulls the possibility of walling off East Berlin, before those nasty old Soviets had the idea. This is certainly not something I ever heard before, and could easily be made up out of whole cloth. But then on the other hand, if it turned out that Jack & Co. gave the idea some thought, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Anybody know where this might have come from?

Just goes to show: liberals are the real conservatives(*). All these plaster deities to venerate!

Even so, it's hard to imagine a less suitable object of veneration than the Kennedys, and Green Beret Jack in particular -- an unscrupulous mendacious chauvinist demagogue who ran in 1960 on the basis of a mythical "missile gap"; a dedicated warmonger who immediately cranked up military spending after a long period of diminution under his predecessor; a grandiose parvenu who puffed up the imperial iconography of the US presidency to unheard-of levels; the father of the Vietnam war, and the architect of the still-enduring Cuban embargo.

You would think a "progressive" like Greenwald might have something better to do than burnish and defend this grotesque and bloodstained legacy.

But you would be wrong.

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(*) And so-called conservatives are anything but. That's another post, however.