Maybe Giant Egos and the Same Spray On Tan Brand? –

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Bobby Kennedy’s son has fallen off his rocker.

I’m renaming him RKJ, instead of RFKJr.

How did this happen? Did the worm really eat part of his brain?

I considered doing a big exposé on him a few years ago when I found out from environmentalists who were friends of mine who left the River Keeper organization Kennedy founded in a huff. They confirmed it was all about the money for Kennedy from the start.

It sounded like a good idea, placing an environmental activist on every river, creek and stream in the country. Especially when you didn’t have to raise the money or pay the leaders yourself. Just get them to raise the money to pay their own salaries, in many cases from their parents, and then send RKJ half the money.

It was a way to make people think you care about the environment and get rich too. That’s when I stopped covering the role of these non-profits in the environmental movement and went back to covering politics myself.

Now that he’s ended his losing campaign for president as an independent and joined Donald Trump’s losing campaign as an anti-environment, pro-big business Republican, in the effort to get a job with the federal government for some reason, his egomania has become front page news in places like The Washington Post.

RFK Jr., environmental warrior, backs the ‘drill, baby, drill’ ticket

As an independent, Kennedy had promised to be “the best environmental president in American history.” For decades, as an attorney and celebrity activist, he urged more vigorous enforcement of federal regulations guaranteeing clean air and water.

“Now he joins a campaign whose policies, according to critics, would scale back those regulations and weaken the agencies that uphold them,” the Post reports.

His decision has left many of Kennedy’s former allies on environmental causes in shock, even those who had already broken with him over his anti-vaccine views or quixotic presidential bid. Some said the move undid any legacy Kennedy — named one of Time magazine’s “heroes of the planet” in 1999 — could still claim to have in the nation’s environmental movement.

“It’s sad and surreal,” said Michael Brune, a former executive director of the Sierra Club who was arrested alongside Kennedy at the White House in 2013 for protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. “It’s a betrayal of his values and the work that he’s done for most of his career. He’s supporting someone who’s been the most aggressive in terms of trying to undermine our bedrock environmental laws.”

Unlike Republicans who have criticized Trump only to later bend the knee to him, Brune said, Kennedy is, or was, separated from him by seemingly insurmountable policy differences.

“In terms of policy issues that people hold dear, I can’t think of another example where a prominent political figure with such a strong record on one issue can go so dramatically and rapidly in the other direction,” Brune said.

In a speech in Phoenix on Friday announcing the suspension of his campaign in battleground states and his endorsement of Trump, Kennedy seemed to anticipate such criticism, acknowledging that he still had important policy differences with the Republican presidential nominee.

But he said any differences are outweighed by what he called “existential” issues on which he and Trump agree, such as opposing America’s current policy of supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion and “ending the childhood disease epidemic.” Kennedy has for years sown doubts about the safety of childhood vaccines and has promoted debunked theories that link some of those medicines to autism.

“I was a ferocious critic of many of the policies during his first administration. There are still issues and approaches upon which we continue to have very serious differences,” Kennedy said. “But we are aligned with each other on other key issues.”

Kennedy Spurned by Kamala Harris

Now we learn that Kennedy had been trying to get the attention of Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss the possibility of working in her administration – if he endorsed her. Unlike Trump, she declined to talk with him or make a quid pro quo corrupt deal. Her campaign seems to be on solid ground and they don’t need Kennedy’s brand of help.

When it comes to environmental principles, Kennedy’s past rhetoric and activism would seem to align more closely with the Harris-Walz campaign, said Maria Lopez-Nuñez, a partner at Agency, an environmental justice nonprofit and member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. She said Harris has been a key figure over the past four years in efforts to extend environmental protections to marginalized people.

“Vice President Harris has been the face of environmental justice for the Biden administration, and we would expect those policies to continue” if she is elected, Lopez-Nuñez said. “Especially when we’re talking about pollution and climate change, I think she’s the only candidate that’s been explicit about that.”

For large portions of his 49-minute speech on Friday, Kennedy — who began running last year as a Democrat — lashed out at the Democratic Party, saying it had prevented him from competing on a level playing field in the primary and criticizing its legal challenges to his independent candidacy in various states.

In a brief phone interview Friday night before he appeared onstage at a rally with Trump, Kennedy said he was “not enthralled with the Democrats’ performance” on environmental issues. Although he had hinted in his speech that his portfolio in a Trump White House could focus on public health, he said that he believed he could also sway environmental policies.

“I would hope to have an influence on how the environment is treated under his administration,” Kennedy said.

He is dreaming if he thinks he can change Trump. In his time in the White House, Trump dramatically rolled back the protections of the Clean Water Act, the landmark 1972 law. Kennedy used and cited that in his own work for years. Trump slashed funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, which Kennedy has frequently assailed for not going far enough to protect the American public’s health from pollution.

Kennedy, who has denounced the country’s reliance on fossil fuels and repeatedly stood among protesters seeking to block construction on oil pipelines, is now part of a campaign that counts “Drill, baby, drill” among its slogans.

Clearly that worm must have eaten part of his brain. But it’s hard to feel sorry for him with this political turnabout.

For his part, Trump has called Kennedy “the dumbest member of the Kennedy Clan” in a post on his Truth Social platform, saying, “He’s a Radical Left Lunatic whose crazy Climate Change views make the Democrat’s Green New Scam look Conservative.”

But apparently Trump will take any attention and friend he can get right now, as Harris is catching him and going ahead in the polls.

On the Eve of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, New Polls Show Harris Leading Trump in Key Swing States

People Like Tim Walz and Kamala Harris: Trump VP Pick JD Vance is More Unpopular than Sarah Palin

As the Post points out, Kennedy starred in a 2011 documentary exposing the ravages of mountaintop-removal coal mining in Appalachia. In his first year in office, Trump halted research on the risks such mining posed to nearby residents. Kennedy often laments regulated industries’ influence over government and attacked former president George W. Bush for appointing men and women who “seem to have entered government service with the express purpose of subverting the agencies they now command.”

Trump’s EPA became notorious for weakening environmental rules and regulations and non-enforcement of existing environmental laws. Trump’s pick for EPA Scott Pruitt was perhaps the worst, most corrupt cabinet member in history, who was finally forced out in July, 2018.

Scott Pruitt Should Have Been Fired from EPA for Violating the Agency’s Mission

“In the Trump administration, among the appointees, they didn’t have anyone who cared about what the science said,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire and former director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists who has tracked environmental policy across presidential administrations. “To a large extent, it was what powerful business interests wanted.”

Rosenberg said Project 2025, a detailed plan for a potential future Republican administration led by the Heritage Foundation, envisions further reductions to the powers of environmental regulators and cooperation with polluting businesses. (Trump has recently distanced himself from the plan, though some of his former advisers were involved in it.)

Kennedy’s desire to join such an administration, Rosenberg said, is hard to square with his avowed environmental convictions. “I’m trying to understand the logic, and I can’t.”

Blackening the Kennedy Legacy

In another Washington Post story, columnist Karen Tumulty says were it not for the fact that he was blessed at birth with a revered name, RKJ “might never have amounted to anything but a crackpot on the fringe. Again and again, to the dismay of his extended family, (he) has sullied the Kennedy name and the dimming aura of Camelot by spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, most dangerously ones that undermine public confidence in vaccines.”

Opinion – By endorsing Trump, RFK Jr. betrays the Kennedy legacy

“His bizarre campaign for president this year — with its revelations that he had a dead worm in his brain and once left the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park — was an embarrassment. But his announcement on Friday that he would ‘throw my support’ to Donald Trump in battleground states represents a betrayal of a higher order.”

Given how low Kennedy has been polling, his endorsement probably won’t make much of a difference in the presidential race, she says. “Yet in casting his lot with a former president who preaches intolerance and division, he has cast aside the principles for which generations of Kennedys have stood.”

Among the earliest of those causes was immigration. While still a senator in 1958, John F. Kennedy wrote an essay highlighting the contribution that new arrivals made to America, and arguing for more generous policies toward them.

His own Irish forebears had faced “the hostility of an already established group of ‘Americans,’” the future president noted. “It is not unusual for people to fear and distrust that which they are not familiar with. Every new group coming to America found this fear and suspicion facing them.”

He did not live long enough to see the immigration reform he envisioned become law in 1965. However, JFK’s essay “A Nation of Immigrants” was published as a book after his assassination and inspired his youngest brother, Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, to carry forward a cause that both of them viewed as integral to the full realization of civil rights in this country, and of course the Kennedy family support was critical in launching the political success of Barack Obama, the first African American president.

“Our streets may not be paved with gold,” Ted Kennedy said during the Senate debate on that law, “but they are paved with the promise that men and women who live here — even strangers and new newcomers — can rise as fast, as far as their skills will allow, no matter what their color is, no matter what the place of their birth.”

Compare that with what Trump expressed the day in 2015 that he stepped off an escalator in his Fifth Avenue tower and announced he was running for president. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Beyond stoking the xenophobia so abhorred by the Kennedy brothers, Trump has animated his candidacy with grievance and calls for retribution against all his enemies. This he portrays as a sign of his strength.

How different that is from the character displayed in April 1968 by Robert F. Kennedy. As he was preparing to deliver a presidential campaign speech in a poor Black neighborhood of Indianapolis, the New York senator learned that civil rights champion the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Knowing the potential for violence in a city that was yet unaware of the news, Kennedy climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck and delivered, extemporaneously, what is regarded as one of the greatest orations of the 20th century.

He implored the shocked crowd to put aside hatred and instead “make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.”

After quoting from memory the words of his favorite poet, Aeschylus, about the discernment that comes from pain, he said: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be White or whether they be Black.”

Back then, before his vanity campaign and his sad grovel for a place in Trump’s orbit, RKJ still understood his father’s legacy: “He saw America as an exemplary nation. … That we should know the difference between leadership and bullying, that we should try to promote democracy.”

He can blame it on the worm if he wants too. But from now on, most Americans will see RKJ as a political worm. Any chance he had at a successful career in politics just died, like the worm in his head.
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