LANCE PAYETTE SAID:
I’m clearly upsetting you folks [at The Education Forum] and promise to go on an extended hiatus, but here is why I giggle at 98% of conspiracy theorizing:
1. You’re planning a Presidential assassination.
2. Your chosen patsy will be on the sixth floor of the TSBD.
3. You have no way of knowing or controlling how many people will be in Dealey Plaza or where they will be, how many will have TV, film or still cameras, or how many will be astute observers.
4. If you placed the real shooter(s) elsewhere in the TSBD and/or in the Dal-Tex Building, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to prove the shots had not been fired by your patsy.
5. You could easily complicate the issue of proof (and enhance your chances of a successful assassination) by shooting at JFK both as he came down Houston Street toward your patsy and as he went up Elm Street away from your patsy.
6. Instead, you choose not to shoot at JFK at all as he comes down Houston Street but to place shooter(s) on the Grassy Knoll, in a manhole, on the overpass or at other location(s) in front of JFK as he moves away from your patsy.
7. Because you have made this choice, you must confiscate or alter films and photos, intimidate and murder witnesses, alter the body, fake the autopsy photos and x-rays, terrorize the doctors at Parkland, and do the myriad of other extremely high-risk things conspiracy theorists believe were done; the conspiracy outlined in steps 4 and 5 would have required none of this.
8. Because you have done this, your conspiracy must involve a vast network of seemingly unrelated people and agencies, whereas the conspiracy outlined in steps 4 and 5 would have required no more than a handful of people.
9. Despite confiscating and altering films, intimidating and murdering witnesses, altering the body, faking the autopsy photos and x-rays, terrorizing the doctors at Parkland, and doing the myriad of other extremely high-risk things conspiracy theorists hypothesize were done, you allowed the patsy to walk out the front door of the TSBD.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Indeed. I've been pointing out the obvious flaws in the "Let's Shoot JFK From The Front And Blame A Patsy In The Rear" scenario for years now....
"I've often wondered if ANYONE who believes in the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was nothing but a mere patsy has ever even pondered upon the pre-assassination thought process that must have been dancing through the collective conspiratorial craniums of those unknown plotters who were the brilliant architects of the incredible plot that featured a lone patsy being framed in Dealey Plaza on 11/22/63. .... Did the people who dreamed up this impossible-to-pull-off frame-the-lone-patsy plot really NOT consider the possibility of ALL SIX of the bullets [per the script utilized in Oliver Stone's fantasy film "JFK"] being fired by the three assassins striking President Kennedy (or all six shots hitting SOMEBODY in Dealey Plaza anyway)? .... [Stone's film is] great movie-making, but the 'patsy' plot is just idiotic." -- DVP; 2005 & 2010
More....
The Patsy Plot Silliness (Part 1)
How To Frame A Patsy (And How Not To Do It)
DVP Movie Review For Oliver Stone's "JFK"
RON ECKER SAID:
You can do that by ignoring a likely scenario. It's likely that Oswald was not supposed to be a lone shooter. He was to be the one shooter who got caught. There was obviously more than one shooter. But they decided to claim Oswald was the lone shooter when something went wrong. Like Oswald being taken alive, for example. And obviously claiming that Oswald was a lone shooter makes NO SENSE AT ALL. But they got away with it, and we've seen how they got away with it for 55 years.
LANCE PAYETTE SAID:
The beauty of my request is that you don't have to engage me at all. Just show the rest of the world how the above scenario can be explained in terms of common sense, logic, or any basis other than the conspirators being escapees from an asylum.
One way, of course, is to separate the assassination conspiracy from the cover-up conspiracy. Never mind what the assassination conspiracy was, the cover-up conspiracy was to destroy all evidence of more than one gunman in furtherance of the Lone Nut explanation. But this would have required an elaborate, convoluted, multi-agency effort beginning almost instantaneously after the assassination and continuing for decades thereafter - scarcely more plausible than a unified conspiracy theory.
I thank Ron for his comments. But when you say "Such complications were the choice the assassins made when they decided that it was important that the president be seen butchered in broad daylight," this is an after-the-fact assumption that this is what the assassins wanted. The logical extension of this is what Sandy suggested on the Prayer Man thread: the conspirators were so brazen they didn't even care if their patsy was standing in full view on the steps of the TSBD at the time of the assassination.
Every which way I examine the various conspiracy theories, they all bump their heads on common sense and logic. Jake has pointed out that sometimes the final explanation of an event doesn't mesh with what seemed at first blush like common sense and logic. Sometimes what really happened is truly bizarre. But here we do know there was a Presidential assassination in broad daylight. We do have mountains of evidence as to what occurred. We aren't simply speculating in the dark. .... In these circumstances, it is not unreasonable to say "Show me how what you think happened would have been consistent with rational assassination planning or makes any sense at all."
What I see on the part of conspiracy theorists is an effort to force-fit the square pegs of their theories into the round holes of common sense, logic, evidence and reasonable inferences. They essentially work backwards. You can ignore me (and DVP) and this observation, but I don't believe you can counter it by anything other than more force-fitting of square pegs into round holes. You can say "Nonsense!" or "Ignore him!" or "Easily dismissed!" but I don't believe you can provide a convincing substantive response.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID ALL THIS.
JAKE HAMMOND SAID:
The fact that no one shot on Houston surely suggests that a lone nut in the TSBD was not to blame...
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
You're not thinking things through here, Jake. If Oswald had shot with the car on Houston Street, he would have literally been FACE-TO-FACE (in a sense) with the largest amount of fire power in the motorcade---the Secret Service. Waiting until the cars turned onto Elm makes perfect sense to me. Such a delay guaranteed that all the SS agents (and many of the policemen on motorcycles) would be looking AWAY from Oswald's location, thereby making return fire more difficult.
In addition, as you (Jake) correctly pointed out yourself, an early shot on Houston could have meant an easy escape route for the President, by taking the car straight ahead on Houston instead of turning onto Elm. Perhaps that's another reason Oswald didn't want to attempt a shot on Houston. He knew that if the car got to Elm, there was really no escape routes available at all. The car would be forced to proceed straight on Elm toward the Triple Underpass. No side streets to escape on. Even if the first shot were to miss the target (which I believe it did), Oswald knew he'd still have several more seconds to get off additional shots before the car could possibly speed away from the kill zone.
And based on the Tom Dillard picture of the 6th-floor window (below), which was taken just seconds after the last shot was fired, I think it can practically be proven that the sniper who occupied that Sniper's Nest on the sixth floor of the TSBD had every intention from the get-go of firing at the President only AFTER the limousine had turned onto Elm Street. And I say that because of the configuration of the boxes stacked on the window sill of the sixth floor --- i.e., those boxes are situated in such a way so that the top "rifle rest" box is pointing southwest---down Elm Street (and the corner of that top box is easily visible in Dillard's photo below).
And I think it's reasonable to assume that the assassin placed that top box on the window ledge at some point PRIOR to JFK's car coming into Dealey Plaza. The assassin would not want to be burdened with the chore of rearranging his rifle-rest boxes at the last second or during the assassination attempt itself. I think even most conspiracy theorists would agree with me on that last point.
REPLAY....
RON ECKER SAID:
There was obviously more than one shooter.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Then why does all of the physical evidence point back to just ONE shooter named Oswald on the 6th floor?
Can you answer that last question without interjecting the words "fake", "planted", or "destroyed" into the discussion?
GEOFF HEINRICKS SAID:
What a waste of electricity and bandwidth.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Yeah, I agree. CTers are a waste, aren't they?
GEOFF HEINRICKS SAID:
Thanks for playing. You get a home version of our game, and a $35 gift certificate for Spiegel...
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Chicago 60609???? Great! Thanks.
GEOFF HEINRICKS SAID:
David, you do have a sense of humour (and recall...I forgot the zip code, but recognized it immediately)!
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Thanks, Geoff.
I have to maintain a sense of humor when dealing with JFK conspiracy theorists. For, I ask, how can a reasonable person not bust out laughing when confronted with the proverbial "Multi-Gunmen, One-Patsy" conspiracy theory being discussed in this thread? It's just too laughable for words. Especially when we add in the following layer of absurdity which has been crammed into the theory by this forum's very own Mr. David S. Lifton of Orange County, California....
"It was a plot not just to murder President Kennedy by shooting him, but then (i.e., afterwards) to alter the medical facts of the case (i.e., alter the wounds, remove bullets, etc.) -- all of that done to change the story of how JFK died. To alter the "medical facts" and thus change the "legal facts" as to how JFK died for the FBI, and for any subsequent investigation, whether it was a presidential commission, a congressional investigation, whatever. It would not matter. Viewed that way, this was a plot "with a built-in cover-up"--and was akin to a piece of domestic espionage." -- David Lifton; May 5, 2013
Now, I think all sensible persons with their wits about them can fully agree with me when I say that a robust sense of humor is certainly required after reading the above paragraph.
Would you not concur, Mr. Heinricks? :)
DAVID ANDREWS SAID:
Let me point out that:
Shooting JFK full-frontal on Houston Street and succeeding first obviates the triangulated-fire ambush pattern, and its values of mortal certainty and subterfuge; second, it draws direct attention to a shooter in the TSBD, instead of creating an atmosphere of uncertainty of firing positions, the value of which should be obvious; third, there is enough circumstantial evidence from film and witness reports to determine that the first shots from various positions occurred as the limo turned from Houston onto Elm, which calls Bollocks! on the thematics of your argument (not meaning you, Geoff).
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
I love this thread! It's fun to watch the conspiracists flop around as they try to convince themselves that the alleged (and insane) Multi-Gun, Solo-Patsy plot was a plan that a band of JFK-hating assassins would have actually wanted to put into action in 1963.
My favorite part of David Andrews' last post of utter desperation is this....
"...creating an atmosphere of uncertainty of firing positions, the value of which should be obvious."
In other words --- Why make this a fairly simple crime and shoot the target from the location of our lone patsy, when we could make things ultra-complicated and run the risk of exposing the multi-gun plot immediately by firing at Kennedy from God knows how many non-"Patsy" locales, thereby "creating an atmosphere of uncertainty of firing positions, the value of which should be obvious"?
Is it "obvious" to you, Lance?
Yeah, me neither.
But, like I said to Geoff earlier --- "I have to maintain a sense of humor when dealing with JFK conspiracy theorists." :)
DAVID ANDREWS SAID:
Go read the back threads, where this stuff was hashed a long time ago. You're counting on the membership forgetting that we won these arguments.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
So you say. But I say your "Conspiracy" side hasn't won an argument yet.
And you're not even close to winning the "common sense" side of the "Multi-Gun, One-Patsy" argument. That one went to the "Lone Nutters" in the first round.
SANDY LARSEN SAID:
There were two conspiracies --- one to kill Kennedy (and blame it on the Russians and Cubans), and the other to cover up the first.
DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
And — incredibly! — BOTH "conspiracies" had one very important thing in common --- Frame Lee Harvey Oswald!
What remarkable like-mindedness on the part of the TOTALLY DIFFERENT PEOPLE involved in each of your two make-believe "conspiracies".
Wouldn't you agree with my "remarkable" comment, Sandy?
David Von Pein
December 22-23, 2018
