It's That Time in the Election Cycle When We Turn On Third Party Candidates

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

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

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) July 2, 2024

To be very clear - he did not / not eat a dog. It was a goat. On everything else he is guilty as charged, but not the dog. Get that straight. 

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 woman 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.