Schadenfreude is a dish best served hot. So it was with great relish we learned that one of our least favorite people, Nixon protege/apologist and political hitman Roger Stone, folded like a cheap suit on L.A. talk radio last week at the first sign of resistance to Stone's current scam, a book on the JFK assassination.
See also: - Roger Stone Promotes Book About Kennedy Assassination
Even more tasty was that Stone himself put us on to his wimp-out, tweeting to all the world that he'd "never been interviewed by a more ignorant, offensive jerk than Douglas McIntyre at KABC in LA. A real asshole." (He's never been interviewed by yours truly.)
Hoping to capitalize on the 50th anniversary of the Bad Day in Dallas, Stone is making the rounds with a warmed-over treatment of the long-running fever dream that Lyndon Baines Johnson was the man who ordered the hit. It's a theory also favored by Illuminatiphobes, but Stone isn't certifiably nuts, except like a fox.
As fate (cruel fate) would have it, it was on the very morning of the anniversary, Friday, November 22, that Stone, a part time Miami Beach resident, was slated to yak it up in drivetime with talk show host McIntyre. Also a columnist with the L.A. Daily News, McIntyre does not suffer fools -- or foolishness -- gladly, and he and Stone clashed immediately, as soon as Stone began spouting pseudo-history. Here's how it went down, beginning at 2:44 of the 7 a.m. segment here:
McIntyre: Lay it on us. How did LBJ get JFK killed?Stone: Well, first of all, the classic way: motive, means and opportunity. Lyndon Johnson blackmailed his way onto the 1960 ticket to begin with. JFK didn't want him.
McIntyre: That's not true. Roger, it's simply not true. Robert Kennedy didn't want LBJ on the ticket...
Stone: If I may, Lyndon Johnson and House Speaker Rayburn went to JFK with a dossier which they got from J. Edgar Hoover...
McIntyre: That's nonsense.
Stone: You clearly haven't read my book.
McIntyre: No I haven't. But I've studied LBJ my whole life...[unintelligible, arguing over each other]...Let's set some ground rules here.
Stone: Okay.
McIntyre: We can plug the book and people can read the book. I'm not gonna read the book. I'm gonna throw it out the second -- in fact, I'm gonna throw it out [sound of book landing in waste basket]...
Stone: Good.
McIntyre: It's thrown out now. But here's the deal.
Stone: This segment's over.
McIntyre: Okay.
Stone: This segment's over. Have a great day.
After a short exchange with his co-host, McIntyre said he has "a tolerance for conspiracy theories" but that guests "can't come on and make statements and claim them to be true when I know them not be true." He then offered an explanation of LBJ's presence on the 1960 ticket in terms of garden-variety political calculation: JFK needed to keep Texas in the Democratic column, thus LBJ.
Stone, a hardened cynic by trade (and cynicism not to be confused with realism), prefers a more byzantine and lurid version of the tale, of course, being well-schooled in political cynicism by the master himself. (It doesn't hurt that it sells more books.)
But Stone also sells himself as a political tough guy, a hard-nosed operative. Not tough enough to stand his ground when an interview turns combative, apparently.
We've tweeted Stone (actually, we twitter-taunted him) for some comment. No reply yet.
We emailed Doug McIntyre for his response to Stone's tweet calling him the "asshole of the day." McIntyre replied that "We re-Tweeted it with the following: "Badge of honor!"
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