IN: Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr. (September 6, 1888 - November 18, 1969) was an American businessman, investor, and politician known for his high-profile positions in United States politics. Kennedy was married to Rose Kennedy, and three of their nine children attained distinguished political positions: President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), and longtime Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy (1932-2009). He was a leading member of the Democratic Party and of the Irish Catholic community.

Kennedy's close ties with Republican (GOP) Senator Joseph McCarthy strengthened his family's position among Irish Catholics, but weakened it among liberals who strongly opposed McCarthy. Even before McCarthy became famous in 1950, Kennedy had forged close ties with the Republican Senator. Kennedy often brought him to his family compound at Hyannis Port as a weekend house guest in the late 1940s. McCarthy at one point dated Patricia Kennedy. When McCarthy became a dominant voice of anti-Communism starting in 1950, Kennedy contributed thousands of dollars to McCarthy, and became one of his major supporters. In the Senate race of 1952, Kennedy apparently worked a deal so that McCarthy, a Republican, would not make campaign speeches for the GOP ticket in Massachusetts. In return, Congressman John F. Kennedy, running for the Senate seat, would not give any anti-McCarthy speeches that his liberal supporters wanted to hear. At Kennedy's urging in 1953, McCarthy hired Robert Kennedy (age 27) as a senior staff member of the Senate's investigations subcommittee, which McCarthy chaired. In 1954, when the Senate was threatening to condemn McCarthy, Senator John Kennedy faced a dilemma. "How could I demand that Joe McCarthy be censured for things he did when my own brother was on his staff?" asked JFK. By 1954 Robert F. Kennedy and McCarthy's chief aide Roy Cohn had had a falling out, and Robert no longer worked for McCarthy. John Kennedy had a speech drafted calling for the censure of McCarthy but he never delivered it. When the Senate voted to censure McCarthy on December 2, 1954, Senator Kennedy was in the hospital and never indicated how he would cast his vote. Joe Kennedy strongly supported McCarthy to the end.

Did McCarthy get anything in return?

OUT:

IN: Sam Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, blogger, and podcast host. He is a critic of religion and proponent of the liberty to criticize religion. He is concerned with matters that touch on spirituality, morality, neuroscience, free will, and terrorism. He is described as one of the "Four Horsemen of atheism", with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.

Harris considers Islam to be "especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse," relative to other world religions. He asserts that the "dogmatic commitment to using violence to defend one's faith, both from within and without" to varying degrees, is a central Islamic doctrine that is found in few other religions to the same degree, and that "this difference has consequences in the real world." In 2006, after the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, Harris wrote, "The idea that Islam is a 'peaceful religion hijacked by extremists' is a dangerous fantasy--and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge. It is not at all clear how we should proceed in our dialogue with the Muslim world, but deluding ourselves with euphemisms is not the answer. It now appears to be a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside. But it is important to recognize why this is so--it is so because the Muslim world is utterly deranged by its religious tribalism. In confronting the religious literalism and ignorance of the Muslim world, we must appreciate how terrifyingly isolated Muslims have become in intellectual terms." He states that his criticism of the religion is aimed not at Muslims as people, but at the doctrine of Islam. Harris wrote a response to controversy over his criticism of Islam, which also aired on a debate hosted by The Huffington Post on whether critics of Islam are unfairly labeled as bigots: Is it really true that the sins for which I hold Islam accountable are "committed at least to an equal extent by many other groups, especially [my] own"? ... The freedom to poke fun at Mormonism is guaranteed [not by the First Amendment but] by the fact that Mormons do not dispatch assassins to silence their critics or summon murderous hordes in response to satire. ... Can any reader of this page imagine the staging of a similar play [to The Book of Mormon] about Islam in the United States, or anywhere else, in the year 2013? ... At this moment in history, there is only one religion that systematically stifles free expression with credible threats of violence. The truth is, we have already lost our First Amendment rights with respect to Islam--and because they brand any observation of this fact a symptom of Islamophobia, Muslim apologists like Greenwald are largely to blame. Harris has criticized common usage of the term "Islamophobia". "My criticism of Islam is a criticism of beliefs and their consequences," he wrote following a controversial clash with Ben Affleck in October 2014 on the show Real Time with Bill Maher, "but my fellow liberals reflexively view it as an expression of intolerance toward people." During an email exchange with Glenn Greenwald, a critic of the New Atheists, Harris argued that "Islamophobia is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia. And it is doing its job, because people like you have been taken in by it."

what else does he think about it?

OUT:
"The idea that Islam is a 'peaceful religion hijacked by extremists' is a dangerous fantasy--and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge.