John F. Kennedy: One more Sarah Palin villain

One was a graduate of Choate and Harvard, a president of eloquence for the ages, while the other is a Wasilla, Alaska, high school dropout who mumbles on morning TV -- but both get dissed in Sarah Palin's new book.

Levi Johnston, father of Bristol Palin's baby, is a predictable target. John F. Kennedy takes the reader by surprise. But Sarah Palin's commentary on JFK helps demonstrate the depth of shallowness in one with possible aspirations to Kennedy's job.

Palin takes out after a defining Kennedy speech, the 1960 appearance where the Catholic presidential nominee discussed separation of church and state before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.

Kennedy's speech "essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are," declares Palin, and Kennedy "seemed to run away from his religion."

What did Kennedy actually say? In a seminal passage he declared:

"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end -- where all men and all churches are treated as equal -- where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice -- where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind -- and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their work in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood."

"I do not speak for my church on public matters -- and the church does not speak for me," he added.

Whatever issue came before him, Kennedy argued, he would decide "in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside pressures or dictates."

Joel Connelly has been a staff columnist for more than 30 years. He comments regularly on politics and public policy. Joel Connelly has been a staff columnist for more than 30 years. He comments regularly on politics and public policy.

Running away? Nonsense. Kennedy was promising to use the intellect and conscience that God had given him, and to obey his oath of office to uphold the Constitution.

The words ring loud today, when groups define themselves as "Values Voters" -- as if others are not. The appeal for brotherhood resonates in an America where TV talking heads question people's loyalty to country based on the city or region where they live.

Of course, Kennedy defined a president's religious views as private, in the context that faith is "neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."

We've seen a demagoguery in the air on this front. Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell claimed that church-state separation was nowhere to be found in the U.S. Constitution. In Nevada, there was an ugly hit on the Mormon faith of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Catholic candidates for public office have taken hits right and left, from ultra-orthodox bishops who treat communion wafers as campaign buttons, and from militants who treat advocacy for life as a secular sin.

Palin starts peddling "America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag" this week with a 16-stop book tour. The trip reflects an exclusionary view of America, in geography anyway. She carefully avoids both coasts.

She takes hits at the religious faith of our current president. She uses a campaign remark in which Michelle Obama, swelling with pride at her husband's support, declared: "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country."

"I guess this shouldn't surprise us, since both of them spent almost two decades in the pews of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church listening to his rants against America and white people."

Has this profiteering politician, who judges the faith of others, ever stopped to ponder a basic commandment of the faith: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor?"

Joining the pantheon of right-wing villains, Kennedy and Obama are in illustrious company.

Glenn Beck has gone after Franklin D. Roosevelt, recently declaring of FDR: "His policies stripped the free-market system and actually prolonged the Depression."

Kelly Emerson, newly elected Island County Commissioner, went further at a Tax Day rally, charging that FDR "threw up into the Great Depression." (Note to Kelly: The Depression began in 1929, Roosevelt took office in 1933.).

Beck has, of course, taken after Woodrow Wilson -- No. 1 in his list of "Top Ten Bastards of All Time" -- and Theodore Roosevelt. Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Beck read a statement in which TR declared: "We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well-used . . . so long as the gaining represents benefits to the community."

"Is that what the Republican Party stands for?" Beck asked. "No!" came the response.

The incident accurately reflects a party that would hold hostage the extension of unemployment benefits to millions of Americans in exchange for extending tax cuts to the wealthiest 2 percent of taxpayers.

Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist, suggested last week that such folk as Palin and Republicans in Congress would build a new Gilded Age and are offering "a bridge to the 19th Century."

The demagogues of today evoke Know-Nothings from earlier in the 19th century, but they may be going back further than that.

The Texas Board of Education, revising schoolbooks, recently cut Thomas Jefferson from a selection of individuals whose writings inspired revolutionary change in the 18th and 19th centuries, and deleted a reference to "the impact of Enlightment ideas."

It's worth asking: If Sarah Palin (or Texas Gov. Rick Perry) ever gets to the White House, will quotations about separation of religion from government be sand-blasted off walls of the Jefferson Memorial?