I’m so glad you took him on, Liza. He’s really awful. He’s been on my wrong side since he began publicly lying about vaccines causing autism—a theory, if you can call it that—based on an old extract written by someone who faked evidence. That study was swiftly debunked. Clearly, Kennedy doesn’t read. (I am the mother of a now adult autistic son, and I do read.) Love the cartoon and the drawing ✍️.
He’s astonishing. You should read the interview with David Remnick, who also has an autistic child. It’s short and David doesn’t waste any time. Thanks, Linda.
I love your comments and agree completely. He is a dangerous know nothing with an ego to rival Mr. Trump. He espouses total nonsense, and if his name was not Kennedy no one would even be listening. In the same vein, I am fond of saying that if you listen to Donald Trump speak and imagine him as a patient in a psychiatric ward, he would be getting extra medication! RFK Jr is not far behind.
330 Million people and this is all we can come up with. We’ve got more choices in the breakfast cereal aisle. Makes one think about the sausage grinder politics really is...
I’m Team Biden — let’s be perfectly clear on that —because he’s done a very steady, solid job as a serious POTUS, but a lot of me wants to become a young, vibrant, hopeful, future-forward country again like we were with Barack Obama, Jack Kennedy... it’s not youth so much as it is the promise of a runway ... for the same reason I now pick my doctors based on their age... I want someone who will outlive me, not retire on me when I need them most to know who I am, what I’ve been through, to not forget my history ... anyway, I just think we should be able to widen the pool just a little bit if only to dilute the kooks who rise up like a turd in a pool every cycle and grab media attention, hungry for another balloon boy or Timmy in the well...
I think we will be going younger next time around. Right now, we have to get Trump and the far right more marginalized. Can't risk it on a newcomer. Biden has been so great.
Though I live in NW Indiana now, I was born and grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts. I well remember the 1960 presidential election which was a tremendously proud moment for Irish-Americans, of whom there are no shortage in the Bay State. JFK was one of us, or so the story went. That the Kennedy family was dysfunctional, headed by a patriarch who was a monster of evil, went unremarked.
I also remember the day that President Kennedy was assassinated. I was a freshman in high school by then, and we got the news via an announcement over the school’s public address system by Brother Thomas, the principal. I’ll never forget that moment, nor the days that followed. They heralded America’s descent into the maelstrom of the Sixties: a low, dishonest decade if ever there was one. By 1969 I was in uniform, bound for Vietnam; in 1973 I returned to civilian life in a country that had become unrecognizable. The world I knew as a boy was gone. Indeed, the boy was gone.
In a way I see RFK, Jr.—and you’re so right about him, Liza—as a blast from that dismal passage of the past. The New Left was a snake pit of nihilism and conspiracy theorizing masquerading as revolutionary fervor. He has the same vibe, even if he doesn’t use the same jargon. You gather the impression that yeah, he’s looking to burn it all down. In some ways the guy reminds me of Trump.
RFK, Jr. will never be president , of course. But he could, I agree, be a spoiler, given President Biden’s increasingly obvious decrepitude. The way things are going, 2024 may come to look more like 2016 than 2020. With RFK, Jr. as a third-party candidate, Trump could actually win—a thing that seemed impossible a year ago.
I agree with most of what you say except Biden's "increasing deprepitude." And the 60's was a time of change, for sure, and we needed change. It was messy. But as a woman, I benefited from much of the revolutionary messiness....as did minorities. Not that it's perfect now, of course it's not. I don't believe we are in a revolutionary messiness now, although historians might say we are. Or we always are! We need to be careful --Trump and company are trying to do stage a coup from the inside now.
Messy that decade was. And you're right, there were elements of positive change at work in the Sixties. But most of the problems that plague us today are traceable to those years, and there's a conspiracy of silence about that. Baby boomers wax nostalgic about the Sixties—those who went to college, anyhow. Those who went elsewhere have a different story to tell.
I agree that we're not living through a revolutionary era today. There's endless talk about "social justice" but most people, especially younger people, are passive consumers of social justice: They expect the government to deliver it. Our politics today are based on unwillingness to confront problems and avoidance of hard choices; this is true on both sides of the ideological divide. Nobody's eager to man the barricades and wave the red flag. And on balance, that's no bad thing. As Chairman Mao once said, a revolution is not a dinner party.
"The revolution will not be televised," Gil Scot Heron. I live in a bubble, granted, but I think there are more commited young people now than in recent years. And I don't mean the left Bernie folks, but real concern and thought about how to fix things. Real understanding of social justice.
I may as well come right out and admit that I'm allergic to "social justice." It's one of those vague, lofty terms to which all kinds of dubious and disreputable ideas attach themselves. The appeal to social justice is why government at all levels has ceased to prioritize the things it knows how to do—keep the streets in good repair, maintain law and order, provide for the national defense—in favor of things it doesn't know how to do—eradicate poverty, fight climate change, etc. and so forth.
Most social problems can't be solved, though they can be managed. For instance, poverty persists in this country, the richest in the world, despite all efforts to eliminate it. This is frustrating for many people. But poverty has been made manageable: The welfare state ameliorates its worst features. By global standard, indeed, American poverty is not poverty at all. But it is dependence on government largesse, which by now has become generational. That's a problem that nobody knows how to solve.
Today's young people will receive this and other reality checks as they undertake to fix things.
Well, it sounds like we disagree, and that's okay! I like social justice. Of course bad folks are in all initiaives, people will work the system. But I fundamentally think social justice is a good thing.
I have no doubt that RFK Jr. is running for president solely to gather millions more followers for marketing his many snake oil schemes. He has learned that lesson from T***p: politics can be the most profitable business for a scam artist. I watched his movie THE REAL DR. FAUCI and if I hadn't fact-checked his many false claims--and there were at least one per minute--I would have been snowed. The movie is a masterwork of propaganda. This guy is nearly as dangerous as T***p. He is unelectable, but he could turn many Democratic voters away from the polls with his lies and end up being the Ralph Nader spoiler--or the Russian disinformation apathy puppet-- of 2024..
Love the cartoon. Good on ya for pointing out Kennedy, the guy is a total wack job. He’s been known in the documentary world as a real threat and a lunatic for a while, he’s produced some so-called documentaries (I hate having the word documentary even associated with him) that are retrograde and dangerous.
I certainly hope that all or most of us liberals realize that this Kennedy is a joke and bad one at that. tRUMP must be convicted or stopped any possible way short of murder.
You are right that Kennedy is an unfit candidate in every way. Those of us who were into our teens when JFK was murdered have had a long time to contemplate how the shine of the Kennedys has dimmed. Camelot was made of flimsy cloth indeed, and the Kennedy men serially disappointed, redeemed themselves, and disappointed again. (The women of the family also redeemed them through quiet, constructive work for the public good.) So it’s not so surprising that this Kennedy has no one’s interest at heart but his own. I disagree with your characterization of Sen. Sanders as some kind of election spoiler. He ran a compelling campaign in the primaries, but when he lost to Clinton he loyally campaigned on her behalf. This is normal, it’s how our politics is supposed to work. It’s not his fault that Mrs Clinton made significant mistakes that cost her the election. I think you do wrong to lump him in with vanity candidates like Nader and Perot.
I hear you on the Kennedys, and agree. But I repsectfully disagree with you on Sanders. He did not whole heartedly support her right away, and dragged out his ending his campaign, and he criticized her so much that too many of his followers could not/would not support her. He would not embrace women's rights enough for me. I don't dislike Sanders economic ideas at all, having been a something of a socialist in my early days, it's just I found them not important in that race given the looming threat of Trump. I think Sanders did Clinton real harm, wooing the young voters away from her. She made a lot of mistakes, I agree, and had been demonzed by others for 30 years....but Sanders helped her lose. I see Sanders a bit like I saw Nadar-- men who had ideas that they thought so right that everyone else should embrace, to the point of causing real problems. Perot was a vanity candidate, you're right. I Kennedy is a mixture of both! I hope we can agree to disagree!
Sure, we can agree to disagree. I sincerely hope, however, that future candidates will avoid Clinton’s mistakes. If she had been a more astute candidate she would have realized she needed to pay much more attention to Sanders’ and Warren’s supporters. Once nominated, she needed to address the dimming economic prospects of young people and working class citizens. She was in touch with educated people, especially women, and thought that would give her the edge over Trump, but that was too narrow a focus.
First of all, your cartoon made me laugh out loud. I had to show it to my husband and he did the same. Kennedy doesn't deserve my attention at all as he's a non viable candidate, thank heavens.
Love it, love it, love it!!! You have reached the heart of the issue in one drawing! Thank you for helping us see a waste of votes could go to a spoiler.
Reminds me of Shwartzenegger?
I’m so glad you took him on, Liza. He’s really awful. He’s been on my wrong side since he began publicly lying about vaccines causing autism—a theory, if you can call it that—based on an old extract written by someone who faked evidence. That study was swiftly debunked. Clearly, Kennedy doesn’t read. (I am the mother of a now adult autistic son, and I do read.) Love the cartoon and the drawing ✍️.
He’s astonishing. You should read the interview with David Remnick, who also has an autistic child. It’s short and David doesn’t waste any time. Thanks, Linda.
I love your comments and agree completely. He is a dangerous know nothing with an ego to rival Mr. Trump. He espouses total nonsense, and if his name was not Kennedy no one would even be listening. In the same vein, I am fond of saying that if you listen to Donald Trump speak and imagine him as a patient in a psychiatric ward, he would be getting extra medication! RFK Jr is not far behind.
I agree! Thanks, David.
330 Million people and this is all we can come up with. We’ve got more choices in the breakfast cereal aisle. Makes one think about the sausage grinder politics really is...
I’m Team Biden — let’s be perfectly clear on that —because he’s done a very steady, solid job as a serious POTUS, but a lot of me wants to become a young, vibrant, hopeful, future-forward country again like we were with Barack Obama, Jack Kennedy... it’s not youth so much as it is the promise of a runway ... for the same reason I now pick my doctors based on their age... I want someone who will outlive me, not retire on me when I need them most to know who I am, what I’ve been through, to not forget my history ... anyway, I just think we should be able to widen the pool just a little bit if only to dilute the kooks who rise up like a turd in a pool every cycle and grab media attention, hungry for another balloon boy or Timmy in the well...
I think we will be going younger next time around. Right now, we have to get Trump and the far right more marginalized. Can't risk it on a newcomer. Biden has been so great.
you got the bullseye with that cartoon.
Thanks, Nancy!
Though I live in NW Indiana now, I was born and grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts. I well remember the 1960 presidential election which was a tremendously proud moment for Irish-Americans, of whom there are no shortage in the Bay State. JFK was one of us, or so the story went. That the Kennedy family was dysfunctional, headed by a patriarch who was a monster of evil, went unremarked.
I also remember the day that President Kennedy was assassinated. I was a freshman in high school by then, and we got the news via an announcement over the school’s public address system by Brother Thomas, the principal. I’ll never forget that moment, nor the days that followed. They heralded America’s descent into the maelstrom of the Sixties: a low, dishonest decade if ever there was one. By 1969 I was in uniform, bound for Vietnam; in 1973 I returned to civilian life in a country that had become unrecognizable. The world I knew as a boy was gone. Indeed, the boy was gone.
In a way I see RFK, Jr.—and you’re so right about him, Liza—as a blast from that dismal passage of the past. The New Left was a snake pit of nihilism and conspiracy theorizing masquerading as revolutionary fervor. He has the same vibe, even if he doesn’t use the same jargon. You gather the impression that yeah, he’s looking to burn it all down. In some ways the guy reminds me of Trump.
RFK, Jr. will never be president , of course. But he could, I agree, be a spoiler, given President Biden’s increasingly obvious decrepitude. The way things are going, 2024 may come to look more like 2016 than 2020. With RFK, Jr. as a third-party candidate, Trump could actually win—a thing that seemed impossible a year ago.
I agree with most of what you say except Biden's "increasing deprepitude." And the 60's was a time of change, for sure, and we needed change. It was messy. But as a woman, I benefited from much of the revolutionary messiness....as did minorities. Not that it's perfect now, of course it's not. I don't believe we are in a revolutionary messiness now, although historians might say we are. Or we always are! We need to be careful --Trump and company are trying to do stage a coup from the inside now.
Messy that decade was. And you're right, there were elements of positive change at work in the Sixties. But most of the problems that plague us today are traceable to those years, and there's a conspiracy of silence about that. Baby boomers wax nostalgic about the Sixties—those who went to college, anyhow. Those who went elsewhere have a different story to tell.
I agree that we're not living through a revolutionary era today. There's endless talk about "social justice" but most people, especially younger people, are passive consumers of social justice: They expect the government to deliver it. Our politics today are based on unwillingness to confront problems and avoidance of hard choices; this is true on both sides of the ideological divide. Nobody's eager to man the barricades and wave the red flag. And on balance, that's no bad thing. As Chairman Mao once said, a revolution is not a dinner party.
"The revolution will not be televised," Gil Scot Heron. I live in a bubble, granted, but I think there are more commited young people now than in recent years. And I don't mean the left Bernie folks, but real concern and thought about how to fix things. Real understanding of social justice.
I may as well come right out and admit that I'm allergic to "social justice." It's one of those vague, lofty terms to which all kinds of dubious and disreputable ideas attach themselves. The appeal to social justice is why government at all levels has ceased to prioritize the things it knows how to do—keep the streets in good repair, maintain law and order, provide for the national defense—in favor of things it doesn't know how to do—eradicate poverty, fight climate change, etc. and so forth.
Most social problems can't be solved, though they can be managed. For instance, poverty persists in this country, the richest in the world, despite all efforts to eliminate it. This is frustrating for many people. But poverty has been made manageable: The welfare state ameliorates its worst features. By global standard, indeed, American poverty is not poverty at all. But it is dependence on government largesse, which by now has become generational. That's a problem that nobody knows how to solve.
Today's young people will receive this and other reality checks as they undertake to fix things.
Well, it sounds like we disagree, and that's okay! I like social justice. Of course bad folks are in all initiaives, people will work the system. But I fundamentally think social justice is a good thing.
I have no doubt that RFK Jr. is running for president solely to gather millions more followers for marketing his many snake oil schemes. He has learned that lesson from T***p: politics can be the most profitable business for a scam artist. I watched his movie THE REAL DR. FAUCI and if I hadn't fact-checked his many false claims--and there were at least one per minute--I would have been snowed. The movie is a masterwork of propaganda. This guy is nearly as dangerous as T***p. He is unelectable, but he could turn many Democratic voters away from the polls with his lies and end up being the Ralph Nader spoiler--or the Russian disinformation apathy puppet-- of 2024..
yep!
Love the cartoon. Good on ya for pointing out Kennedy, the guy is a total wack job. He’s been known in the documentary world as a real threat and a lunatic for a while, he’s produced some so-called documentaries (I hate having the word documentary even associated with him) that are retrograde and dangerous.
Thanks. I had no idea about his documentaries. Ugh, that's insidious!
I certainly hope that all or most of us liberals realize that this Kennedy is a joke and bad one at that. tRUMP must be convicted or stopped any possible way short of murder.
agreed!
You are right that Kennedy is an unfit candidate in every way. Those of us who were into our teens when JFK was murdered have had a long time to contemplate how the shine of the Kennedys has dimmed. Camelot was made of flimsy cloth indeed, and the Kennedy men serially disappointed, redeemed themselves, and disappointed again. (The women of the family also redeemed them through quiet, constructive work for the public good.) So it’s not so surprising that this Kennedy has no one’s interest at heart but his own. I disagree with your characterization of Sen. Sanders as some kind of election spoiler. He ran a compelling campaign in the primaries, but when he lost to Clinton he loyally campaigned on her behalf. This is normal, it’s how our politics is supposed to work. It’s not his fault that Mrs Clinton made significant mistakes that cost her the election. I think you do wrong to lump him in with vanity candidates like Nader and Perot.
I hear you on the Kennedys, and agree. But I repsectfully disagree with you on Sanders. He did not whole heartedly support her right away, and dragged out his ending his campaign, and he criticized her so much that too many of his followers could not/would not support her. He would not embrace women's rights enough for me. I don't dislike Sanders economic ideas at all, having been a something of a socialist in my early days, it's just I found them not important in that race given the looming threat of Trump. I think Sanders did Clinton real harm, wooing the young voters away from her. She made a lot of mistakes, I agree, and had been demonzed by others for 30 years....but Sanders helped her lose. I see Sanders a bit like I saw Nadar-- men who had ideas that they thought so right that everyone else should embrace, to the point of causing real problems. Perot was a vanity candidate, you're right. I Kennedy is a mixture of both! I hope we can agree to disagree!
Sure, we can agree to disagree. I sincerely hope, however, that future candidates will avoid Clinton’s mistakes. If she had been a more astute candidate she would have realized she needed to pay much more attention to Sanders’ and Warren’s supporters. Once nominated, she needed to address the dimming economic prospects of young people and working class citizens. She was in touch with educated people, especially women, and thought that would give her the edge over Trump, but that was too narrow a focus.
Yes! We can agree to disagree. Thanks for the discourse and for subscribing, I really appreciate it.
First of all, your cartoon made me laugh out loud. I had to show it to my husband and he did the same. Kennedy doesn't deserve my attention at all as he's a non viable candidate, thank heavens.
Thank you!
Love it, love it, love it!!! You have reached the heart of the issue in one drawing! Thank you for helping us see a waste of votes could go to a spoiler.
Thank you!
Terrifying that people like him have any traction politically.
It really is.