If Only There Had Been Signs That RFK Jr. Is Nuts

It's incredible that he dropped no hints

Some Senate Republicans are regretting their vote to confirm RFK, Junior as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. John Barrasso of Montana says he is “deeply concerned”. Thom Tillis of North Carolina noticed that Kennedy’s statements don’t match his actions. And Bill Cassidy of Louisiana had this question:

Kennedy did not tell Senator Bennett that more people died from the vaccine than from Covid, but he did tell Bennett than he thinks mRNA vaccines are deadly, especially to young people, told Mark Warner that he doesn’t accept mainstream estimates of how many people died from Covid, and once called the Covid vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made”. And it does seem fair to ask why someone should get a peace prize for inventing the deadliest vaccine ever made. Of course, Cassidy said “Nobel Prize”, not “Nobel Peace Prize”, so maybe Kennedy meant that he would nominate Trump for the Nobel Prize In The Slaughter Of Untold Millions.

It appears that some Senators feel duped. In his confirmation hearing, Kennedy said that he’s not anti-vaccine, but he’s implemented several anti-vaccine measures at HHS: He cancelled funding for mRNA vaccines, stopped ads for flu vaccines, and fired the entire 17-member panel that sets vaccine schedules and is replacing them with vaccine skeptics. Kennedy is acting like someone influenced by fringe anti-vaccine conspiracies — if only there had been signs that he’s an unqualified loon with out-of-the-mainstream views. You can’t blame Senators for giving Kennedy their vote when there were no clues whatsoever that he might have a screw loose.

Of course…I mean…if you want to be really thorough — if you want to pick though Kennedy’s past with a fine-tooth comb — I suppose an extreme skeptic could find one or two subtle indications that Kennedy might not be playing with a full deck.

For example, there’s the fact that a worm ate his brain. According to Kennedy, doctors found a parasite that had crawled into his head, eaten part of his brain, and then died. But that’s not really odd behavior by Kennedy — that’s odd behavior by the worm. You’re supposed to eat dirt, dumb worm! It’s not Kennedy’s fault that a parasite chowed down on his frontal cortex like a football team at a pig pickin’, and trying to infer something about Kennedy’s makeup from that data point is pure partisanship.

And the worm thing is pretty much the only indication that Kennedy might be a few eggs shy of an omelette. Except — I guess — for his frequent and unusual interactions with animal corpses. Yes, the category of stories one could call “Kennedy animal corpse yarns” is a shockingly robust body of literature. Canonical entries include:

• The time Kennedy came across a bear cub that had been killed by a car and decided to put it in his trunk so that he could skin it and harvest its meat. Ultimately, Kennedy dumped the bear in Central Park, an act that he attributed to “the redneck in me”. (Ed. note: Kennedy is the scion of one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the world.)

• The time — according to his daughter — that Kennedy sawed the head off a dead whale, strapped it to the family minivan, and drove home with “whale juice” pouring into the car windows. His daughter described the event as “just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

• The time he sent a friend a photo of him about to chow down on what appears to be a goat carcass (pictured above) along with a joke about visiting the best dog restaurant in Seoul. This led to Kennedy publicly deny that the animal in the picture was a dog, making him the first presidential candidate to deny eating a dog since Nixon’s famous “Checkers died of natural causes” speech in 1960.

Come to think of it, Kennedy’s whole life is full of details that are…let’s say “quirky”. As a youth, he struggled with drugs and had trouble with the law. He became an environmental lawyer and spearheaded the closure of a nuclear plant that led to CO2 emissions in New York state going up by 37 percent. He’s been married three times and cheated on his second wife with 37 different women — a nod to the CO2 increase he caused in New York, perhaps? — and he recorded all the affairs in a journal. He has promoted conspiracy theories about the 2004 election, chemtrails, the origin of AIDS, and whether Lyme disease was created by the government. He has a long history of vaccine denialism that includes chairing an anti-vaccine group, writing an anti-vaccine article for Salon that was retracted for inaccuracy, and saying that we should “build statues” to the disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield. Also, his family has been loudly warning about his odd behavior for years, but who among us hasn’t had 28 cousins write a scathing letter to influential Senators calling us a piece of shit?

Senators could only have known that Kennedy is an anti-vaxx nut job if they had access to the internet, TV, radio, a subscription to any newspaper, kept mildly apprised of Washington scuttlebutt, or remained awake at the confirmation hearing that they, themselves called. The only faint hint that Kennedy might be a couple puppies short of a litter was his decades-long pattern of absolutely batshit bananas behavior. If Senators Cassidy, Tillis, Barrasso, and others had been able to pick up on subtle cues that Kennedy is a walking freak show, then perhaps he wouldn’t be running what is probably the most important scientific agency in the world.

But they didn’t. I don’t blame them — the man didn’t really drop any breadcrumbs. So now we’re stuck with Kennedy, unless enough senators decide that it might be bad to have major medical decisions made by a whale-sawing conspiracy theorist whose brain was long-ago converted to worm shit.

---