Republicans Still Stupid

Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican in the U.S. House representing the 13th Congressional District in Florida (basically suburban Tampa), will be leading a new committee re-examining the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 (61 years and 3 months ago). 

She is a member of the Congressional Freedom Caucus (a far right Republican caucus) and the "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Caucus." 

She served in the Air Force and then the Air National Guard for a combined five years as an "airfield management specialist", earned a bachelor's of science degree in biology at the University of West Florida after finishing her service (no honors are mentioned in her biography, she her grades probably weren't all the great), modeled in 2013 in Sport Illustrated's online site, and briefly worked as a cocktail waitress in a gentleman's club, later appeared as a swimsuit model in Maxim magazine in 2014, and then worked in various conservative political posts until she was elected to Congress in 2022, on her third attempt to be elected to this office. 

She married before being elected and gave birth to her son the summer after she first took office. She considers herself to be a Messianic Jewish Christian, like her father. She started to identify as Hispanic and took her grandmother's surname "Luna" in 2019, a year after joining a Hispanic outreach post for a conservative political group (in a 2015 filing she had identified herself as non-Hispanic white, even though both of her parents have at least partial Mexican origins). She wrote a book in 2018 about her special operations soldier husband, and another more general political manifesto in 2021. She grew up in Southern California. Her parents never married or lived together, her father was a drug addict, her mother, who an elementary school teacher and homemaker who married a man other than her father when she was nine, but her mom divorced four years later. She has a brother and a sister.

While this might have its place as an academic exercise for a panel of university historians, possibly updated with new information, the Warren Commission already produced a voluminous report on the matter in 1964, and this will do nothing to improve the lot of the people of our fine country. 

Anyone newly found to be culpable in the incident is dead by now, and an inquiry led by a 35 year old Republican Congresswoman who doesn't even realize how long ago this way, and whose parents are probably even too young to remember the assassination, if they were even born yet, is just utterly incapable of credibly expanding our understanding of this event.

The really embarrassing part, though, which shows just how utterly unqualified, ignorant, and over her head this 35 year old is with even this very junior assignment, is that she told members of the press in a press conference, that she wants to interview JFK's attending physicians and the members of the Warren Commission about the incident.

How is she going to manage that when all of those people are dead? 

How many people with any meaningful connection to this event who are living haven't succumbed to dementia and are otherwise healthy enough to share anything meaningful that hasn't already been covered in reports and interviews already?

Someone who was 25 years old in 1963, when it happened, is now 87 years old, and any attending physician who would have treated the President in Dallas, Texas in 1963, would have been at least 25 years old then to be even a medical resident at the relevant hospital at the time. And, let's not kid ourselves. You don't assign a first year resident to try to save the popular young President of the United States from a gunshot wound. You give that task to the most seasoned physician you have available, who would be considerably older right now, even if he were alive (very few women were doctors handling ER and trauma cases in 1963 in Texas). A first year resident would have no meaningful first hand knowledge of JFK's injuries.

All seven members of the Warren commission, its general counsel, ten of its fourteen junior lawyers, and ten of its twelve staff member are dead.

There only people connected to the Warren Commission who are still alive are four junior lawyers for the Commission, and two people who were on the Commission's staff at the time. The youngest of them, a junior staff member, turns 85 years old this year. The other junior staff member turns 88 years old this year. The oldest of those still living, a junior lawyer for the commission, turns 96 years old this year. All of the other junior lawyers will turn at least 91 years old this year.

Gary Hart, a former Democratic U.S. Senator from Colorado, Presidential candidate in 1988, and diplomat, who is currently 88 years old and was 26 years old at the time of the assassination, is the only one of the eleven people who served on the Church Committee in 1975-1976 who is still living, although probably a few more of the people who were on the staff of that committee are also still living. He too has already told us everything he had to say about this assassination.

In addition to more than one official commission/committee investigation, there have been dozens of film and fictional accounts of the event, and many non-fiction and documentary treatments of it. What more is there left to say?

If classified documents related to the assassination exist and are now being declassified, just release them and let the media or the Congressional Research Service do this job without diverting the precious time of members of Congress who have no relevant expertise to conduct this investigation anyway.

Also, how hard is it to assign one of your staffers (members of Congress have budgets to pay for quite a few of them in addition to unpaid interns) to look up some of the relevant facts on Wikipedia, and to do some math, before you tell the press what your approach to leading this committee will involve?

I don't expect every 35 year old woman on the street to know when JFK died, or how many years ago that was. 

But, if you a member of Congress, who has a college degree, who is going to be leading a renewed Congressional inquiry into the assassination, and are holding a press conference about how you plan to go about doing that, we have a right to expect that you have done your most basic homework and know more about the event than the average person.