Tag Archives: Robert F Kennedy Jr

Thoughts On Everything And Nothing …

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Global Issues, History, Political commentary, Social commentary

I just seem to have a jumble of thoughts bouncing around in my head today – I think that extra hour is somehow to blame for my lack of focus.  So, bear with me for just a few very short thoughts ‘n snippets …

Generally, when a child throws a temper tantrum, only a handful of people at most hear it.  But when that child has his own social media platform and the press follow him around 24/7 waiting for him to have a tantrum, then unfortunately the entire nation is exposed to his screaming tantrums.  And the same people who would be disgusted if they saw a child throwing a tantrum in the grocery store, seem to love the tantrums of a crazy old man with the mind of a toddler.  Any guesses who I’m talking about?

Imagine that in a fit of anger … perhaps he didn’t like what you fixed for supper, or his favourite shirt wasn’t clean … your husband threw something, knocked over a candle, and set the house afire.  Flames are racing up the curtains, spreading across the carpet … you need to get the baby, call 911, and get out of the house, but he won’t let you near the phone and is blocking the door.  He has put his family in imminent danger and is also putting neighbors up and down the street in danger as the fire spreads.

This is the state of the United States today.  The angry, vengeful spouse is the Republican Party, the wife and baby are We the People, and the neighbors are our allies, including Ukraine and Israel who really, really need this nation to be at its best right now.  Instead, it is at its worst.  The House of Representatives, operating under a very slim Republican majority, brought the business of governance to a screeching halt for three weeks, and now that they’re back at work, they are more interested in game-playing and rallying their supporters for next year’s election than in passing meaningful legislation to help our allies and averting a full government shutdown in just 12 days.

From Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon …

With Netanyahu at the top of international news every day, I hope people are beginning to see it’s not just Trump — corruption and right wing authoritarianism are inextricable. We see that in the federal court systems. These Federalist Society judges were bred for two purposes: Pushing a Christian nationalist agenda and rigging the system so rich people can cheat and steal without consequence. 

It’s demoralizing, because it will take years, if not decades, to fix. But Ukranians are out there dying in the hopes of one day having a functioning democracy. We can stick out our less deadly fight here.

Perspective … we must learn to put it all in perspective.

The most famous line ever uttered by the late President John F. Kennedy was from his 1961 Inaugural Address …

“Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

It seems to me that today we have lost sight of that message.  In fact, I believe that many have reversed the phrase.  More on this one later when my thoughts stop bouncing.

And speaking of the late JFK, on Friday his nephew, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is running next year for the office of president, received a standing ovation at an anti-vaccine conference (who knew there even was such a conference?) when he said that if elected president next year, he would direct the National Institute of Health to halt all research on infectious diseases for a period of eight years.  A standing ovation … where are people’s minds???

He also said he would appoint a “like-minded” attorney general and use the power of that attorney general to threaten editors of medical journals and force them to publish studies that had been disproven, such as that ridiculous one about ivermectin, the drug used to kill parasites in horses, being an effective treatment for Covid.  He really, really wants to make the U.S. a third-world country that will be shunned by all!  Fortunately, his chances of ever becoming president are about as good as mine.  But wait … didn’t I say that about another famous idiot back in 2016?  And look where that got us.  🙄

And on that note, it’s time for me to move on to something useful, like … maybe a nap?  Enjoy the rest of your weekend and I’ll be back tomorrow morning with Jolly Monday!

Dr. Peter Hotez’s Fearless Battle Against Antiscience, Antisemitism, and RFK Jr.

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Election 2024, Environmental Issues, History, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Re-blogs, Social commentary

Our friend Annie writes today about the latest headline-making Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has sullied the family name with his ridiculous lies and conspiracy theories, and the anti-science, anti-Semitic movements that seem to be gaining a foothold in the U.S. (and many other nations) today. Excellent post, Annie, and two thumbs up to Dr. Peter Hotez!

annieasksyou...

(Wherein Bill Maher Gets Pulled Into RFK Jr’s Allegedly Reasonable Vortex)

Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, is the Professor of Pediatrics Molecular Virology at Texas Children’s Hospital and the founding dean of the Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine. Hotez has been instrumental in developing and delivering nearly 100 million doses of a safe, non-proprietary, Covid vaccine to “low and middle-income countries.”

His dedication to protecting children worldwide from tropical and other diseases spans decades.

The opening tweet above was the first in a thread (series) that Dr. Hotez placed on Twitter recently in his constant…

View original post 1,506 more words

A Wart On The Family Name

Posted on by under Election 2024, Environmental Issues, Global Issues, History, Political commentary

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.

The Circus Came To Town

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, education, Election 2024, History, Political commentary, Social commentary

Folks, there are over 18 months, precisely 565 days left until election day 2024 and already I am SICK AND TIRED of it.  Already, every day there are surveys, polls, projections, not to mention campaign promises and threats, even from those outliers who are about as likely as me to even be their party’s nominee!  If I never heard the names Trump, DeSantis, or Haley again, I could be quite content.  But the Republican circus show isn’t the only one in town.

Unfortunately, the maga-virus, one as deadly in its own way as the coronavirus, has now spread to the Democratic Party.  Two cases in point:  Marianne Williamson who declared her candidacy last month, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who declared his candidacy yesterday.  It is doubtful that either stands a snowball’s chance of being the ultimate nominee, but what they can and will do is pull some support away from President Biden, who has not yet formally declared his candidacy, but has said he intends to run for re-election.  Isn’t it bad enough to have a bunch of loud-mouthed clowns on the other side … do we really need them on this side, too?

Marianne Williamson ran a brief and lackluster campaign in 2020, dropping out in January 2020, ten months before the election.  Her education background is nil, having attended several colleges at different times, always dropping out before earning a degree.  Although she has run for both a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives (2014) and the presidential nomination (2020), she has never held a position in government.  Qualifications?  She has written 14 ‘self-help’ books, attempted a career as a cabaret singer, ran a “metaphysical bookstore/coffeeshop” (whatever the hell that is), and gives religious lectures throughout the U.S. and Europe.  Um … sorry, I see nothing there that qualifies her to lead a diverse nation of 330 million people!

Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., riding on the coattails of his famous father, Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, and his two uncles, John F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy.  But believe me when I tell you that he is an apple that fell far from the Kennedy tree!  This Kennedy is not cut, as one writer put it, of the same “Ask what you can do for your country” cloth as his uncle, assassinated President John F. Kennedy, but rather has fallen into the dark pit of conspiracy theories, primarily surrounding vaccines and social media.

Kennedy at least has a few more qualifications than Ms. Williamson, having obtained a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia and a Master of Laws from Pace University.  His career has been spent as an environmental lawyer who has advocated for the protection of waterways, indigenous rights, and renewable energy.  Now, I’ll give credit where credit is due, and he earns a thumbs up for his views and efforts on behalf of the environment.  But then … he jumped on the conspiracy theory bandwagon, claiming that childhood vaccines, flouride in drinking water, and wireless communications lead to autism.  These theories have long since been scientifically debunked, but that hasn’t stopped Kennedy.

And then along came Covid, complete with restrictions, lockdowns, and vaccines.  Kennedy hopped on that conspiracy bandwagon as well, claiming that both Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were trying to profit off a vaccine, and suggesting that Bill Gates would cut off access to money of people who do not get vaccinated, allowing them to starve.  In November 2021, Kennedy’s book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health was published wherein Kennedy alleged, without presenting any plausible evidence, that Fauci sabotaged treatments for AIDS, violated federal laws, and conspired with Bill Gates and social media companies such as Facebook to suppress any information about COVID-19 cures, to leave vaccines as the only options to fight the pandemic.  🙄  At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, he sought to undermine public trust in vaccines, comparing government efforts to impose mandates in some places to “Hitler’s Germany.” Both Facebook and Instagram took down accounts of a group he runs for spreading medical misinformation.

Kennedy’s family overall does NOT support him in his campaign for president.  Several of Kennedy’s siblings and relatives are openly backing President Joe Biden for a second term. Three of them are diplomats for the Biden administration. Just a smattering of his children and grandchildren showed up for his campaign launch.  My best guess is that John, Bobby, and Ted are rolling over in their graves right about now.

Top Left: Robert “Bobby” F. Kennedy (Getty Images/File). Top Right: John F. Kennedy (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images). Bottom Left: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (REUTERS/Brian Snyder). Bottom Right: Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy (Photo by Laura Patterson/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images).

Yep, the Democratic Party has its very own maga member now and it can only go downhill from here.  I don’t predict that either Ms. Williamson or Mr. Kennedy will even come close to winning the nomination, but they sure as hell can wreak some havoc in the interim.  So, welcome to ELECTION 2024, and brace yourselves for the next 565 days, for what you see today is but the beginning.