Political Observer comments.

The Reader experiences a kind of political vertigo, while reading this meandering ‘essay’. Even Tom Friedman and David Brooks manage to express coherence of very particular kinds, in their political/moral/commentaries. Frank Bruni’s political observation, are tinctured in Pop Culture references, that are not just amateurish but maladroit- his practice of comedy lacks the sophistication, that experience in front of an audience brings.

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It feels dangerous to write about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: In the lag between when I put the finishing touches on this and when it becomes publicly available, I could be a conspiracy theory or two behind.

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I could be mulling his apparent belief that the coronavirus was diabolically engineered to spare Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish people while he has already moved on to the hypothesis that Ron DeSantis is a hologram gone haywire (I could buy into this one), the revelation that earbuds deliver subconsciously perceptible government propaganda through our auditory canals or the epiphany that French bulldogs cause global warming. He’s a crank who cranks out whoppers the way Taylor Swift disgorges perfect pop songs.

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But we hang on her words for her craft. We hang on his for his clan. Kennedy is where paranoia meets legacy admissions. Like Donald Trump, with whom he has much more in common than he probably cares to admit, he’s an elitist hawking anti-elitism, an insider somehow branding himself an outsider, a scion styled as a spoiler, a populist as paradox. Why do Americans keep falling for these arrogant oxymorons?

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But we hang on her words for her craft. We hang on his for his clan. Kennedy is where paranoia meets legacy admissions. Like Donald Trump, with whom he has much more in common than he probably cares to admit, he’s an elitist hawking anti-elitism, an insider somehow branding himself an outsider, a scion styled as a spoiler, a populist as paradox. Why do Americans keep falling for these arrogant oxymorons?

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Oh, I understand the appeal of the perspective that narcissists like Trump and Kennedy peddle: that sinister operators deploy nefarious tricks to shore up their own dominance and keep hard-working, well-intentioned, regular folks in their places. It’s an exaggeration of inequities and injustices that really do exist, and it simplifies a maddeningly complex world. Ranting about George Soros or Anthony Fauci feels a whole lot better than raging at the vicissitudes of fate.

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But why turn to preachers like Trump and Kennedy for this anti-gospel? It’s like consulting sharks about veganism. Trump commenced his career with a big, fat wad of money from his rich father. He attended business school in the Ivy League. He hobnobbed with big-name politicians before he turned against them. He has an eagle’s nest of a penthouse in the financial capital of the world.

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But why turn to preachers like Trump and Kennedy for this anti-gospel? It’s like consulting sharks about veganism. Trump commenced his career with a big, fat wad of money from his rich father. He attended business school in the Ivy League. He hobnobbed with big-name politicians before he turned against them. He has an eagle’s nest of a penthouse in the financial capital of the world.

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But why turn to preachers like Trump and Kennedy for this anti-gospel? It’s like consulting sharks about veganism. Trump commenced his career with a big, fat wad of money from his rich father. He attended business school in the Ivy League. He hobnobbed with big-name politicians before he turned against them. He has an eagle’s nest of a penthouse in the financial capital of the world.

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But Kennedy’s place in a bona fide dynasty has also meant access, influence, mulligans. “Kicked out of an elite roster of prep schools, he still managed to arrive at Harvard in 1972,” Rebecca Traister wrote in an excellent recent profile of him and his presidential campaign in New York magazine, where she also described how he is “leaning hard into his family in this contest; his logo even borrows the iconography of his father’s 1968 campaign.”

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In an insightful column in The Times, my colleague Michelle Goldberg noted how, at a June rally in New Hampshire, Kennedy pitched his presidential bid as a return of his family’s magic and majesty. “We can restore America to the awesome vitality of the original Kennedy era,” he told an adoring crowd.

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All of which makes him an especially incoherent opportunist. Let’s be clear: As Kennedy promotes the specter of microchips in vaccines, as he posits that H.I.V. may not be the sole cause of AIDS, as he says that Anne Frank had it better than Americans under Covid lockdown, as he claims that Covid vaccines are often deadlier than what they’re supposed to prevent, as he fingers the C.I.A. for his uncle’s assassination and Prozac for mass shootings, he can portray a society in which the deck is stacked against all the little people because the deck has been stacked so heavily in his favor. His rapt audiences and his shimmering Kennedy-ness are inextricable.

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All of which makes him an especially incoherent opportunist. Let’s be clear: As Kennedy promotes the specter of microchips in vaccines, as he posits that H.I.V. may not be the sole cause of AIDS, as he says that Anne Frank had it better than Americans under Covid lockdown, as he claims that Covid vaccines are often deadlier than what they’re supposed to prevent, as he fingers the C.I.A. for his uncle’s assassination and Prozac for mass shootings, he can portray a society in which the deck is stacked against all the little people because the deck has been stacked so heavily in his favor. His rapt audiences and his shimmering Kennedy-ness are inextricable.

Is the evidence clear that Bruni, and his New Democrat allies, are doing to both Kennedy and Cornel West what was done to Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. The one difference is that The Republicans control the House, and have provided ample evidence, that the New Democrats don’t just believe in Censorship, in the name of their political imperative. But demanded that the Hearings be in Executive Session.

The Reader is presented with paranoid political chatter of The New Democrats, recycled by an employee the Paper Of Record, The New York Times. The New Democrats are in a Political Panic over not just Kennedy but Cornel West as alternatives to the Party Of Censorship. The Reader need only look to:

This is the Sick Bitch Who Obama Appointed Chair of the Democratic National Committee and Defended Even after She was Exposed as a Crook:

https://twitter.com/normfinkelstein/status/1682154269708021767?s=20

Political Observer