Robert F. Kennedy is hoping to win the Democratic nomination next year for president. Truth be told, I am more qualified than he is to run for president, for I am at least an honest person. Robert Kennedy is trading on the family name and in the process is tarnishing that name. The world thinks of the name “Kennedy” and they think of the late President Kennedy who was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963. And they think of the late Attorney General, senator, and presidential candidate Robert (Bobby) F. Kennedy, who was assassinated on June 6th, 1968. But if Bobby’s son has his way, he will place a permanent stain on the legacy left by those two men.
The odds of Kennedy actually beating President Biden in the primary are slim-to-none, and surely he realizes it, but for some reason he has decided to throw his hat in the ring anyway, as have so many on the Republican side of the aisle who have zero chance for success. Robert Reich believes that when Kennedy loses the primary, he will launch a third-party candidacy, damaging President Biden in the general election.
Kennedy is a rabid anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who has claimed that the reknowned infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci was orchestrating “fascism.” He has often invoked the Holocaust in his speech, claiming that victims of that horror had more freedom than people in the U.S. today. He claimed that Anne Frank had more freedom for “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” He later apologized for that remark, but words once spoken are never truly erased, for they reflect the true thoughts of the speaker.
Kennedy has found kinship with none other than Twitter’s Elon Musk, who hosted a two-hour conversation with him on Twitter Spaces. It was a mutual admiration society, from what I’m told, with Kennedy licking Musk’s boots, at one point comparing Musk to colonists who died during the American revolution in order to give “us our constitution.”
I find it concerning that Kennedy has rallied more support than I would have thought possible among Democrats. Around 20% say they would definitely support him, and a concerning 64% say they would consider supporting him. Granted, that is not a winning number, however with 517 days left until the election (17 months), a lot can happen. The media and others seem to want to continually focus on President Biden’s age, and heaven forbid that he trip over a sandbag that never should have been on the stage anyway, for then he is deemed to be incapable, incompetent, and any number of other derogatory adjectives. (I tripped over my own pants leg this morning while out watering the flowers … does that make me mentally incompetent???)
Among his numerous conspiracy theories are that he claims to believe it was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that killed both his uncle and his father, not Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan. In fact, he has advocated for Sirhan Sirhan’s release from prison. At one point he claimed that Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had somehow paralyzed 496,000 children in India during a polio vaccine trial. In the past 23 years, there have been exactly 17 cases of vaccine-derived polio in India … not 496,000, not even close. And, naturally, he claims to be convinced that Bill Gates was implanting microchips into patients through the Covid vaccine … in fact, he was largely responsible for starting that falsehood.
Robert Reich has even more to say about this Kennedy in his latest piece …
Make no mistake. Junior has nothing whatever to do with his father – who stood up for economic and social justice (and for whom I worked in the late 1960s).
The younger RFK is a right-wing nut case.
He plans to travel to the Mexican border this week to “try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently.”
He wants the federal government to consider the war in Ukraine from the perspective of Russians.
He doesn’t support a ban on assault weapons and blames the rise of mass shootings in America on pharmaceutical drugs.
He attacks Biden as a warmonger. He charged on Musk’s broadcast earlier this week that Biden “has always been in favor of very bellicose, pugnacious and aggressive foreign policy, and he believes that violence is a legitimate political tool for achieving America’s objectives abroad.”
You can read the rest of Reich’s column here.
I still can’t understand why Kennedy is running as a Democrat, since his ideas align much more with the Republicans than with the Democrats. I sincerely hope that Democratic voters are intelligent enough to stick with the tried and true and not be lured by the Kennedy name. John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy Sr. would die of shame, seeing how this man has abused their name … if they weren’t already dead, that is.
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