NEW: I asked @RobertKennedyJr about the Vanity Fair allegations that he posed with a picture of a barbecued dog and to respond to the sexual assault claim
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) July 2, 2024
He says the picture is of a GOAT. Re: assault allegation he didn't deny it & brought up his rambunctious past pic.twitter.com/WpJ9sRVc19
Vanity Fair just took a big swing at Robert Kennedy Jr., who is polling somewhere below ten percent, but that's enough to make him a possible spoiler in swing states.
Here it is: RFK Jr.’s Family Doesn’t Want Him to Run. Even They May Not Know His Darkest Secrets, and here's a quote from the seventh paragraph in that fairly long article.
After initially denouncing his candidacy last summer, most of the 105 Kennedy relatives —including Bobby’s eight siblings, the largest branch of the family—had hoped his campaign would collapse under the weight of his many bizarre claims and alliances with anti-vax cranks and Trumpworld figures like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. Instead the family has played defense, going public only when Kennedy’s statements went so far out of bounds they had no choice, like when he suggested COVID was “ethnically targeted” to spare Jewish and Chinese people; or his claim that anti-vaxxers suffered worse oppression than Anne Frank (a statement sister Kerry called “sickening and destructive”); or when he claimed there was a mysterious alternative shooter in the death of his father in 1968 (going so far as to interview Sirhan B. Sirhan in prison and proclaim him innocent); or that the CIA was possibly involved in the assassination—claims that caused deep pain for his siblings.Mind you, all that comes before they get to RFK Jr.'s old heroin addiction and his molestation of a young women he employed as a nanny for his children.
RFK Jr. blows all that off as old news, which, I have to say, it is. No less damning for being long known, though, and almost certainly a lot of it is new news to many voters, especially those who weren't even born yet when RFK Jr. was neck-deep in all the traditional Kennedy family vices.
"I had a very, very rambunctious youth," said Kennedy ... So, you know, Vanity Fair is recycling 30-year-old stories. And, I'm not, you know, going to comment on the details of any of them, but it's, you know, I am who I am," he added.He was age 45 when he wouldn't stop feeling up the nanny, but then I suppose Kennedys have a prolonged adolescence.
Well, you know, all that appalling history is, you know, who he is, and, you know, he isn't going to look so good to some voters before, you know, they decide between him and the other choices on the ballot.
10 comments:
RFK Jr is a nut but I kinda like him. If he had the Kennedy voice look out!
That voice is indeed a big problem. Might get him some sympathy votes, though.
It was caused by a 'vaccine injury,' reportedly, which must account for at least part of his vaccine skepticism.
His past and not-so-past transgressions are really, really, bad, even for a Kennedy of his generation. My memory might be getting Kennedys mixed up, but I think I recall him and his cousins spitting at a cop who had pulled them over for some reason; got off scot-free, of course.
That stuff is probably enough to keep him out of mainstream acceptance.
I wouldn't be surprised if that happened. Their Granddad was a SOB.
I think the tide is turning, nothing lasts forever, nothing. Time for the Right to start making mistakes again.
Bob Menendez living proof the Left and the Right have a lot in common!
Old Joe Kennedy was quite the character. He basically invented stock swindling, for which FDR appointed him the first SEC Chairman (1934-35), literally saying "it takes a thief to catch a thief."
And the women! He carried on an open affair with Gloria Swanson in front of his wife, setting the bar for all his sons and grandsons to follow.
And, although this is history lost to the needs of modern politics, the Kennedy Clan was once very much right wing, even into the 1960s. They played touch football at their Hyannis Port home with Senator McCarthy, who dated one of the daughters and was RFK's godfather for one of his kids. RFK also served as co-council to the McCarthy Committee for awhile, which is a fact that has been to popular history (but not to the records of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which has an archive of those McCarthy hearings).
So if the pendulum does indeed swing right, I'll bet the current crop of Kennedys will get out in front of it.
All I knew about Joe was pre WW2 and it wasn't good, not good at all. I wonder what it is about these families that make them so rotten!
War is coming, at first I didn't think so but I do now. The Kennedys will be forgotten.
What makes these family dynasties so, ah, special? A very experienced cop I once knew would say that stone-cold criminals are people "who make up their own laws." They do what they want and, in their minds, what they want defines right and wrong. In Nietzschean terms they re-evaluate all values.
A lot of successful politicians are clearly sociopathic (not that I'm a doctor). They are incapable of making any distinction between the public good and what's good for them personally. The Kennedys seem to fit that description.
Is it due to nature or nurture? Probably both.
They can ( at least in their minds) make reality.
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