On the morning of Tuesday, April 13, 2010, conspiracy theorist James DiEugenio (who believes, btw, that JFK's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was completely innocent of shooting BOTH President Kennedy and Officer J.D. Tippit) posted an article on his CTKA.net website entitled "David Von Pein: Hosting Comedy Central Soon?" (linked below).
OLD LINK (ARCHIVED):
http://www.CTKA.net/2010/dvp.html
NEW LINK:
http://KennedysAndKing.com/david-von-pein...
[FYI: On November 28, 2016, the CTKA.net website was terminated and replaced by a new site, located at KennedysAndKing.com.]
And I just want to take this opportunity to thank Jim for the article (and for the plug).
Why do I want to THANK Mr. DiEugenio for an article that was designed to rip my "lone assassin" position to shreds? Well, frankly, it's because there is nothing in the article for me to get particularly upset about. And, quite frankly again, the quoted excerpts from my Internet writings that DiEugenio has chosen to include in the piece are quotes that are 100% factual (based on the evidence in the JFK case).
For example, DiEugenio actually has the immense gonads to try and use the following quotes of mine against me (and against the Warren Commission's conclusion of Oswald killing President Kennedy and acting alone):
"For aren't hard facts and evidence always more believable than wild speculation and conjecture?"
"The Single-Bullet Theory has still not been proven to be an impossibility."
"What does 'back and to the left' prove? Anything?"
"Let's assume for the sake of argument that there were/are several different Mannlicher-Carcano rifles with the exact same serial number on them of C2766 ... my next logical question (based on the totality of evidence in this Kennedy murder case) is this one: So what?"
DiEugenio pulls one of his biggest boners of the article by making this false claim:
"Only from The Pigpen [Jim is referring to the alt.conspiracy.jfk newsgroup] could such wild nonsense be allowed. .... He [DVP] realized he could not comport normally with the great mass of the public who didn't buy the fantasy of the Single Bullet Theory.
He now made his way to the place where he belonged all along: the John McAdams dominated Google group, alt.conspiracy.jfk. Why is this important? Because historically speaking, McAdams was the first person on the Internet to exhibit critical thinking skills so stilted, comprehension skills so unbalanced, cognitive skills so impaired, all combined with a basic dishonesty about these failings, to the degree that he almost seemed the victim of a neurological disease.
Any strong indication of conspiracy in the JFK case, no matter how compelling, could not permeate his brain waves or synapses. McAdams hates being an outcast or labeled as a propagandist, even though he is. So he constructed a sort of hospice for people like himself who normal thinking people could not tolerate. Actually two of them. One is on his own site and one is a Google Group."
Hey, Jim! I thought this was supposed to be an article berating me--not John McAdams!
Oh, well, I guess DiEugenio thought that he could kill two "lone nutters" with one half-baked article of tripe, so that's what he has tried to do here. Well, he's really attacking three LNers with a single stone/article here, counting Vince Bugliosi too.
And Bugliosi is a person DiEugenio can't resist taking a swipe at when the opportunity presents itself, which it constantly does, considering
the fact that DiEugenio is in the middle of a soon-to-be 11-part so-called "review" of Mr. Bugliosi's masterpiece, "Reclaiming History". And that review is filled with lots of over-the-top nonsense that Jim D. says relates (somehow) to the JFK assassination and to Mr. Bugliosi's fact-based book on that subject.
Part of Jim's never-ending attack on Bugliosi's book includes a detailed (and dry-as-dust) analysis of three of the Warren Commission members whom DiEugenio thinks were all evil, rotten liars and cover-up artists. This "Troika", as DiEugenio continually calls them, includes Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, and John McCloy.
Jim D., as you can tell by now, has a very vivid imagination.
And in addition to believing in some very curious things regarding President Kennedy's assassination, Mr. DiEugenio is also of the false impression that the alt.conspiracy.jfk newsgroup is a MODERATED group that is completely controlled by Professor John McAdams.
Jim, of course, has his Usenet newsgroups mixed up, because alt.conspiracy.jfk is not a moderated group at all; and, in fact, Mr. McAdams very rarely ever even makes a post on that forum. It's at the alt.assassination.jfk newsgroup where McAdams serves as moderator.
I find it quite funny that Jim DiEugenio seems to think that I have to have all of my Internet posts screened (and hence, approved) by Mr. McAdams. Hilarious.
But if DiEugenio had bothered to read some of my articles that are aimed directly at debunking and refuting a lot of the "Oswald Didn't Shoot Anybody" nonsense that he spews weekly on "Black Op Radio" (which are articles and Internet postings that I e-mailed to him directly a year or so ago, but he apparently didn't read any of them), he would have been corrected about his false belief concerning the Usenet forums.
Plus, I find it even more humorous that a JFK assassination researcher like DiEugenio, who has studied the case for decades now, actually thinks that those previously mentioned quotes of mine contain "wild nonsense".
As mentioned previously, DiEugenio also attacked Vincent Bugliosi and his JFK book, "Reclaiming History", in his 4/13/10 article. Jim paid particular attention to a conversation I had with Mr. Bugliosi in August of 2009 (which took place via e-mail, through Vince's secretary, Rosemary Newton).
That conversation with Bugliosi concerned the question of the admissibility into a court of law of famous JFK bullet CE399, with DiEugenio utilizing that conversation to demean and attack Vincent's response to my two questions I posed to him regarding that topic.
DiEugenio said:
"In the Introduction to 'Reclaiming History', Bugliosi tries to insinuate that the televised trial ["On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald"] that he (unwisely) chose to participate in was very close to an actual trial. And that it followed the standard rules of evidence. The author sidestepped the crucial fact that since the trial was in London and the core evidence is at the National Archives, things like the alleged rifle, the shells, the autopsy evidence, and CE 399, were not there to be presented in court. This would not be the case at a real trial."
Well--Duh!
Of course the mock trial wasn't a "real trial" of Lee Harvey Oswald. Everyone knows this right off the bat. And, therefore, it's not very likely that the producers of the London Weekend Television program would be able to get permission to present the actual physical evidence in the London courtroom.
Does that mean that the mock trial should have been scrapped entirely, due to the fact that the physical items of evidence were not available for the jury to view? I think not.
There were, however, photographs of various exhibits and pieces of evidence presented at the trial, and the bottom-line fact remains that the judge at the 1986 television docu-trial in London DID, in fact, allow Warren Commission Exhibit No. 399 to be presented as evidence during the mock trial.
Mr. Bugliosi told me this in 2009:
"The admissibility of CE 399 (along with other items of evidence) was, indeed, dealt with in London by Judge Lucius Bunton at a pre-trial evidentiary hearing, and Bunton, a sitting federal judge in Texas at the time, ruled in my favor that CE 399 (not the actual bullet, of course, which we did not have in London) was admissible at the London trial." -- Vincent Bugliosi; August 22, 2009
Here is a link to the full e-mail conversation I had with Mr. Bugliosi in 2009:
Also -- It seems to me that most conspiracy theorists would definitely WANT bullet CE399 to be admitted into evidence at any trial involving the JFK murder case, instead of those same conspiracists attempting desperately to keep the bullet from being admitted as evidence.
Why?
Because if that bullet was to be deemed INADMISSIBLE as evidence at an Oswald trial, then the defense lawyers would never be able to argue every conspiracy theorist's favorite fantasy theory: The one about CE399 being a "planted" or "substituted" bullet.
And without that type of loony argument to fall back on in a court of law at Oswald's trial, it would take a good deal of the wind out of the sails of the defense team.
Here's another chunk of DiEugenio's article that had me grinning quite a bit:
"To understand Von Pein, one has to go back to his online, forum appearance on the JFK Lancer site back in 2003. Even though moderator Debra Conway warned of submitting "trolling threads" there, Von Pein couldn't help himself. In July of that year, he proclaimed Oswald guilty through what he termed a "mountain of evidence." He then asked, how much of this overwhelming tidal wave of proof would it take to convince a person out of the notion of conspiracy? Quite a thunderous build up eh?
But as with Chaplin's cannon, the explosion fired the shell about two feet away. For Von Pein's "mountain of evidence" consisted of the mildewed litany of discredited Warren Commission data. Which, of course, is not a mountain. It's more like the San Andreas Fault. He began with the above noted specious notion that Oswald owned the rifle; and he ended with the equally specious notion that Oswald could have run down from the sixth floor to the second in time to be seen by Marrion Baker and Roy Truly right after the assassination.
Some of the gems in between were that Oswald definitely killed Officer Tippit and that he also attempted to kill General Edwin Walker. My favorite point was this: "the Single Bullet Theory has still not been proven to be an impossibility." I guess he thinks that if it's not impossible, that means it happened.
[...]
Von Pein even wrote that at Z frame 224, both Kennedy and John Connally were reacting to the same bullet. Which Milicent Cranor, in her previously posted article "Lies for the Eyes", showed to be a howler. In reality Kennedy is reacting and Connally is not [JIM BETTER LOOK AT THE FILM AGAIN, BECAUSE HE'S MISSED A WHOLE BUNCH OF STUFF THAT INDICATES CONNALLY IS REACTING TO A BULLET HITTING HIM AT Z224-Z226]. With a straight face, at the end of this "mountainous" listing, Von Pein wrote, "For aren't hard facts and evidence always more believable than wild speculation and conjecture?" (Posted 7/17/03)"
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Of the above comments, I especially enjoyed the ultra-hilarious part where Jim says that my claim that Lee Oswald owned the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that was shipped to him by Klein's Sporting Goods in Chicago is a "specious notion".
And then there's the part when Jim D. embarrassed himself further by saying: "...the equally specious notion that Oswald could have run down from the sixth floor to the second in time to be seen by Marrion Baker and Roy Truly right after the assassination."
Apparently Jim wants to totally ignore the multiple re-creations that were done by the Warren Commission and the Secret Service in 1964, which were reconstructions of Oswald's alleged movements right after the assassination. Those re-creations, which were performed in the TSBD by John Howlett of the Secret Service, proved beyond ALL possible doubt that Oswald had ample time to get from the sixth floor of the Depository to the second-floor lunchroom in time to encounter Baker and Truly.
One of Howlett's two re-creations of Oswald's movements was done in 78 seconds; while the other was performed in just 74 seconds. And Howlett wasn't running or jogging during either of those reconstructions [see Warren Report Page 152].
In short, Jim DiEugenio's little essay, "David Von Pein: Hosting Comedy Central Soon?", is actually one that I could prop up as being HELPFUL to my lone-assassin position with respect to the JFK case. And that's mainly because, within the article, DiEugenio proves himself to be just exactly like a lot of other kooky "Anybody But Oswald" conspiracy theorists that I have encountered on the Internet for the last seven or eight years.
And, quite frankly, it is beyond my understanding how any reasonable and rational person can place a single ounce of faith in someone who actually believes that Lee Harvey Oswald was completely INNOCENT of shooting both President Kennedy AND Dallas Patrolman J.D. Tippit.
And Mr. DiEugenio, in 2009, took his "Anybody But Oswald" religion to a new level of absurdity when he announced on an episode of "Black Op Radio" that he was of the opinion that Lee Oswald had not carried ANY large bag into the Book Depository Building on the morning of November 22nd, 1963. (No kidding, Jim actually said that in 2009.)
And such a "No Bag At All" theory is a really strange one for a conspiracy theorist to be offering up, because it forces DiEugenio to jettison a belief that is almost always embraced by the conspiracy-happy crowd -- i.e., the belief that Oswald must be innocent because the bag he carried into work on the morning of Kennedy's murder was TOO SHORT to contain LHO's Carcano rifle.
But now, DiEugenio can't use that standard "too short" conspiracy argument anymore, because he thinks Buell Wesley Frazier and Linnie Mae Randle were coerced by the authorities into MAKING UP the story about Oswald having a large bag.
Jim doesn't seem to realize, however, that if the cops had forced Frazier and Randle into creating a make-believe bag from sheer whole cloth, those same evil cops would have surely told the two liars named Buell and Linnie Mae to at least MAKE THE BAG BIG ENOUGH (VIA YOUR LIES) SO THAT THE PROVERBIAL PATSY'S RIFLE COULD HAVE FIT INSIDE THAT BAG!
Anyway, thanks again for the article, Mr. DiEugenio. It can only serve to aid the "LN" cause in the long run by further exposing certain conspiracy theorists (like James DiEugenio) to be people who couldn't care less what the physical evidence shows in the JFK case.
No matter how much "Oswald Did It" stuff a conspiracist like DiEugenio has to mangle and misrepresent, he's willing to do it. And he'll do it, year after year, while pretending to be an advocate for the truth.
Well, Jim, I'm sorry, buddy, but it's not ME who is performing a "Colbert"/Comedy Central act here -- it is you.
David Von Pein
April 13, 2010
PARTS 1-6:
PART 7:
PART 8:
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