Dallas Strives to Shed That "City of Right Wing Hate" Designation It Got Stuck With Post-JFK Killing

Some folks still can't come to terms with the reality that JFK's assassin was a man of the left, a Communist who loved Castro and Cuba:

Friday's 50th anniversary of assassination of President John F. Kennedy is an important moment for Dallas: The city wants to use the occasion to demonstrate how much it has changed.

In the 1960s — after the president's murder — Dallas became known around the world as "The City of Hate." And it was a hotbed of right-wing politics, a magnet for the extremes of the conservative movement at the time. 

If the world would like to see evidence that Dallas is no longer the City of Hate, it need not look further than the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. 

The orchestra is practicing for its four upcoming concerts celebrating the life — and mourning the death — of the 35th president of the United States. 

A Dutch conductor leads an orchestra of black, white, Hispanic and Asian musicians for whom the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination is not an occasion for regret and shame but a canvas upon which they will express their fondest hopes and deepest fears for the country and themselves. 

"You know, cities grow and cities change," says Dallas Symphony CEO Jonathan Martin. "One of the things that I hope that this week will show the world is that the Dallas of 2013 is not the Dallas of 1963."

This just in: the Dallas of 1963 did not murder JFK. Oswald did, and he wasn't even a Dallas native.

And, oh yeah, JFK's brother wasn't killed by a "climate of hate." He was done in by a Zion-loathing Palestinian.

Update: Daniel Pipes writes:

Kennedy’s assassination profoundly impaired American liberalism. James Piereson’s 2007 book “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution” established how liberals could not cope with the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist, murdered Kennedy to protect Fidel Castro’s control of Cuba. Kennedy died for his anti-communism; but this wildly contradicted the liberals’ narrative, so they denied this fact and insisted on presenting Kennedy as a victim of the radical Right, reading Oswald out of the picture.

As the Dallas symphony article shows, they're still inclined to do so even now.

Update: In Expunging Oswald, George F. Will writes that "there is a human instinct to reject the fact that large events can have small, squalid causes..."