Ruthless Bobby

The tragedy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Quoth the raving loon…

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Now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will not make the CNN debate stage on Thursday, let’s review what, precisely, this man has done to be considered to be President of the United States.

1. Born into an accomplished family.

2. (DELIBERATELY BLANK)

Are we clear?

The Q Anon-adjacent goofball has done literally nothing to prepare himself for this massive job. Absolutely nothing.

In fact, on Ari Melber a few weeks ago, Kennedy asserted with an utterly straight face that suing corporations was government experience.

That’s just intellectually insulting.

In contrast, his father, at 42 (Junior is 70 with a fetish for his own pecs), was one of our nation’s greatest Attorneys General, a U.S. Senator from New York, the second-largest state, for three years, had been on several congressional committee staffs in his twenties, and run his brother Jack’s successful senate races and his 1960 presidential campaign. Oh, and he was a U.S. Navy enlisted man for two years from 1944-46.

He was also a thoughtful, empathetic person of character.

Why, precisely, is RFK, Jr. running for president?

Because he sees that his fellow paranoiac and traumatized-daddy-issue man-child spray-painted-tangerine-visaged Trump was able to snooker a lot of people, and maybe, just maybe, he can do it as well.

I don’t doubt that Kennedy is raising some issues that need to be addressed. But being an anti-vax Fauci-basher and professional paranoid wing nut isn’t what the country really needs now.

Look at his poor brothers and sisters.

That’ll be a fun Thanksgiving. Pass the end of the American Experiment, pls.. White meat or dark?

They’re virtually all for Biden, and in the best performance art event ever, they tackled their touch football bro on national television. The other Kennedy kids are generally doing socially useful work, and several have been creditable elected public officials. Their brother is a paranoid crank.

For example, RFK Jr. has decided, wrongly, that Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the murderer of his own father, is innocent, a patently ridiculous assertion. He blames a security guard in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel as the real killer. This man, Thane Eugene Cesar, is dead and no longer able to defend his name. That should be disqualifying enough, but look at our culture. Former President Donald Trump says three crazy lies per paragraph.

Why wouldn’t RFK Jr. see that nutty lies work?

Read Dan Moldea’s The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy. It’s definitive. Mel Payton’s The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy is also similarly terrific. I’d direct RFK Jr. to read them. I suspect he hasn’t.

When we think of who should be a president, certainly RFK Jr. had a lot of potential, oh, say 40 some years ago. I remember his debut well. He wrote a book about a respected federal judge, Frank M. Johnson, Jr.. Maybe he had help with it. I don’t know.

Kennedy was on the Today Show plugging it. I saw him. He was rock-star handsome, articulate, a recent UVA Law grad, and had the smile. He had the touch. Jack Kennedy’s boyhood Choate prep school buddy, Lem Billings, was convinced Junior was The Next President Kennedy. Hard to argue. He wasn't saying that about JFK, Jr., who was really wasn’t that bright. Unfortunately Billings became RFK Jr.’s drug buddy, too.

RFK Jr. turned to heroin, and got so sick on a flight that it had to land in Rapid City, South Dakota so he wouldn’t die.

To his credit, he cleaned up.

But, good Lord, the poor woman he was married to. That ended badly. She died. He had kept a sex diary, too. That ain’t good.

I’ve met RFK Jr. and spent time with him twenty some years ago. He was exactly his father’s age, tall and athletic with laser-blue eyes and chiseled good looks. He wasn’t weird. He was really good at public speaking, and I have to admit he had a lot of future potential. I watched him destroy former Vice President Dan Quayle in a debate in Portland 25 years ago.

I actually felt sorry for Quayle. Kennedy ate his potatoe (sp.?) on stage for an hour.

Eventually, Kennedy got, well, eccentric. He had a show on Air America like Al Franken, and he was drifting off into Grassy Knolland then. Franken, conversely, prepared himself for years to be senator, and I’ve heard more than one person say he’d be a hell of Democratic presidential candidate. I’ve watched Franken for years, and if anyone could come out of media culture left field with the right temperament, it was Al Franken.

Later, RFK Jr. started making these stupendous claims about autism and vaccines, and then expanded his nutty portfolio into all sorts of Trumpy Q theories.

And here we are.

Kennedy picked a running mate so patently absurd, Nicole Shanahan, that even by the lazy new standards of political life, she has no business running for anything higher than San Mateo County Supervisor. She’s the divorced wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who gave her a billion dollar handshake, which she is now pissing away on her loon running mate.

Whatev.

Kennedy’s presumption is one thing; there are lots of political candidates with a name and money. Former 1996 and 2000 GOP presidential candidate Steve Forbes (son of Forbes magazine owner/moneybag Malcolm Forbes, who also inherited his money) immediately comes to mind, but Steve Forbes was coherent, if mostly wrong.

Kennedy hasn’t run anything but his mouth.

The tragedy is that Kennedy was a victim, for awhile. His father was murdered live on national television. Why wouldn’t he be traumatized? He was and is. I get that.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shouldn’t be in a presidential race.

He should be in therapy.

We shouldn’t be forced to be his psychotherapists, either.

We should charge this man by the hour instead of enabling him to potentially help end American democracy.