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At the moment, there is a national conversation going on about how weird Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are. However, those two are relatively newcomers to the S.S. Weird. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., by contrast, is a longtime passenger on that particular transport, as he reminded everyone yet again this weekend.
At the center of the latest whackadoodlery from the son of Bobby, if you haven't heard already, is a dead bear. Over a decade ago, he was in upstate New York on a falconing trip (because apparently he's a medieval feudal lord). While on that trip, Kennedy came across a dead bear. And he did what anyone (read: nobody else) would do in that circumstance: He loaded the bear into his car, so he could take it home and chop it up into some juicy bear steaks.
Apparently, depending on the extent you believe RFK Jr., he ended up not having time to take the dead bear home for butchering before leaving town. So, he drove to Central Park and left it there, with an old bicycle he had in his car. The joke, it would seem, was: "Ha! A bike rider crashed into a bear and killed it! Hahahahahaha!" Um.... OK. Maybe that's how your mind works when part of it was eaten by a worm.
Kennedy thought he'd gotten away with the prank, but he got a call last week from The New Yorker, which was planning to run a full exposé. To get out ahead of the story, Kennedy spilled the beans on himself in a video he posted to eX-Twitter. And his audience for this confession was, of all, people... Roseanne Barr. Yes, the (justly) canceled comedian who loves a good conspiracy theory, who dabbles in casual racism, and who somehow manages to be both Jewish and an antisemite at the same time. Indeed, one side effect of the bear video is that this photo staged by Barr a few years ago was circulating widely on social media over the weekend:
There are just so many layers of bizarro here, it's hard to parse them all.
That's not the only RFK Jr. news, either. The same New Yorker profile also included some text messages the candidate sent to a friend of his, in which he described Donald Trump as "a terrible human being," "the worse [sic] president ever," "barely human" and "probably a sociopath." This certainly is not going to help Kennedy get a job in a second Trump administration.
The question that the New Yorker article is trying to answer, without much success, is exactly what RFK Jr. is trying to achieve with his campaign. We don't know either, although keeping in mind that Kennedy makes most of his money hawking anti-vaxx books and videos, we tend to assume he's on the Marianne Williamson plan. The thing that is clear is that he's slipping; from a high of nearly 10% in some of the polling averages, he's now down to 4-5 points in most of them. And his loss appears to be mostly Kamala Harris' gain. So, his ongoing strangeness is germane to the presidential campaign, far more so than it ought to be. (Z)