Matt Bai writing in the WaPo takes a look at the bizarre candidacy of Kennedy heir and conspiracy monger Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and finds many similarities with the Malignant Loser in style and subject, while running as a "Democrat":
"Like Trump, Kennedy burst onto the cable-TV scene with not a day of actual governing experience but loads of celebrity. He’s a Kennedy, after all, and the one who has always most physically resembled his father — an asset among the octogenarian Democratic set that is hard to overstate, even all these decades later.
He registered nearly one-fifth of the Democratic vote in public polling before anyone had heard him speak. Which says a lot about the enduring Kennedy mystique, but even more about the unease with President Biden’s reelection.
Like Trump, Kennedy is given to skillful demagoguery, casually misleading with the conviction of a truth-teller. In a Fox News interview with a sympathetic Sean Hannity, Kennedy explained how the covid vaccine — which he seems to regard as a vast societal evil, like opioids, or the War on Christmas — utterly failed to stop transmission of the coronavirus, just as the government secretly knew it would.
Of course, the main point of the vaccine wasn’t to stop us from catching variants of the virus — it was to stop those variants from killing us at intolerable rates. Which it did.
What makes Kennedy most like Trump, though, is the overlay of conspiracy and contempt that tinges nearly everything he says, the destructive distrust in the electorate he seeks to channel. During the rambling, nearly two-hour, Trump-like monologue in which he launched his campaign in Boston, Kennedy sketched the bleak tableau of a government wholly owned and controlled by corporations, of nefarious powers in both parties hellbent on enslaving people with bureaucratic mandates."
As Bai notes in his article, Kennedy presents a "cynical mix of star power and misinformation," just as the Malignant Loser. Add to that a dark strain of "populism," and you have a combustable mix that's dangerous to democracy. Notably, he's become a disruptive star on the Fox circuit, happily being used by the likes of "Heil" Hannity to spread disinformation and dissent within the Democratic Party in order to aid the Malignant Loser.
Bai cautions that the last demagogic entertainer that wasn't taken seriously ended up in the Oval Office. Kennedy's conspiratorial candidacy should be taken seriously this time.
