Rename the Kennedy Center

When will they ever learn? When will they eeeee-ver learn?

“Blowin’ in the Wind” is a liberal anthem, but liberals need to take its lesson. Donald Trump just keeps playing the same damn card and liberals keep falling for the same trick.

So, yesterday when Trump’s handpicked board announced that it was renaming the Kennedy Center the Trump-Kennedy Center (he was “surprised!” and “honored!”), liberals went predictably apoplectic. Hakeem Jeffries waved his arms awkwardly even more so than he usually does. Maria Shriver said it was, “beyond comprehension.”

No, it wasn’t. Trump does this every week. Pave over the Rose Garden. Build a massive ball room. Insult Rob Reiner on the day his murder is discovered. All this is sport to Trump and liberals give him what he wants every time.

Plus, he gets the distraction he needs. He’s blowing up boats in the Caribbean, turning ICE into a personal army of brown-shirted thugs, selling out Ukraine, enriching himself and his family through one shady deal after another, and on and on and on. But, hey, let’s go ballistic over the Kennedy Center!

The truth is that for all of the awful policies that Trump advances and of all the symbolic junk that he throws out there just for the fun of watching liberals chase it, this Kennedy Center thing is the least of it. Because, in fact, there’s good reason to change its name, though certainly not to Trump’s.

We’ve got to get over the whole Kennedy thing. JFK was neither a great human being nor a good President. Let me explain.

JFK was a so-so President. He only served less than three years and in that time he accomplished little. In fact, his whole domestic agenda, from a massive tax cut (yes, JFK wanted to cut taxes) to civil rights, was stalled on Capitol Hill and it took his murder and Lyndon Johnson to get it passed.

Worse were his spectacular failures. He gave the go-ahead to the Bay of Pigs fiasco and, after he signaled weakness to Khrushchev, he precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event that nearly brought an end to the world as we knew it. There was the Peace Corps and moving George Wallace aside as he stood in the school house door and he could certainly give a good speech, but that’s about it. Even the moon shot probably would have been bungled by Kennedy. It took Johnson to advance it as quickly as it happened. Certainly, nothing in JFK’s record justifies his post-mortem public relations success.

Then there’s his connections to the mob. When he was running for President he had his mistress, Judith Campbell, over for a weekend at his Georgetown home while his wife and child were away. As the weekend was wrapping up he asked Campbell to take a suitcase filled with $200,000 in cash, provided by his father, to her other special friend, mobster Sam Giancana. Giancana had agreed to spread Joe Kennedy’s cash around West Virginia in what became a successful attempt to buy that primary election. For more on that read Chris Wallace’s “Countdown 1960.”

And then of course there’s ample evidence that Kennedy and his brother stole the 1960 election by stuffing ballot boxes in Illinois and Texas. The respected LBJ biographer Robert Caro has documented what happened in Texas in great detail in his excellent book “The Passage of Power.”

That’s the character of the man immortalized at Arlington, at the Kennedy Center and in countless other places around the country. It’s long past time for us to reconsider the Kennedy’s in a much harsher light.

But of course the answer isn’t to rename the building in honor of a far worse man and a far more disastrous leader. Why not just call it something generic and inoffensive, like The National Center for the Arts?

Trump does this now and then. Completely out of his desire to own the libs or his massive ego or his plain, expansive idiocy he does something that should make us stop and think. This Kennedy Center dust up is one of those things. It’s time to rethink the Kennedy’s.

That’s it for this week, folks. Last weekend before Christmas. I gotta get my cards in the mail.