Sick

It was Donald Trump who let Anthony Fauci run the COVID response when the pandemic hit.  It was Dr. Fauci who saved millions of people despite the fact that the very administration he worked for got in his way.  While Dr. Fauci led the effort to stop the spread of le covíde, Trump gave his administration the blessing to look for a COVID vaccine in Operation Warp Speed.  The vaccine saved millions more lives.

Now, because Dr. Fauci's pushback against Trump in 2020 has put him on his Trump's enemies list, the Republican Senate is prosecuting and persecuting him over how he handled COVID.

Dr. Fauci did make mistakes in handling COVID.  Because he was dealing with a novel virus.  That's the whole point about a novel virus - you're going to make mistakes in dealing with it because no one knows a twit about it!  

Aware that the Senate committee who subpoenaed him to testify on the pandemic, Dr. Fauci pleaded the Fifth Amendment in response to questions from the committee's GOP members - especially Kentucky's Rand Paul, who put his libertarian values in a blind trust before the committee hearing began.   Dr. Fauci has since been held in contempt.

This has all happened at a time when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is in charge of America's public health and is voicing skepticism about vaccines.  And in the wake of Dr. Fauci's inquisition, leading virologists - may of whom the same Debbie Downers who kept shooting down our optimism like clay targets whenever it seemed that the pandemic was abating (and of course, it wasn't) - are warning that those of us who lived through a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic might live to see another pandemic of such magnitude.  Some of them aren't saying "might" - they're saying "will!"  And an anti-vaccine, anti-science administration is in charge. 

If Hakeem Jeffries becomes Speaker of the House in January, we should hope that Trump and Vance are taking medical advice from RFK Jr.  Then maybe Jeffries will become President by February. 

Fall Out Girl

When former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley announced his 2016 presidential campaign at Baltimore's Inner Harbor in May 2015, one reporter covering the event mocked and ridiculed him for being so self-assured that he could defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination and brought up, with a great deal of snark, the protesters who showed up at the event to protest the Baltimore police killing of Freddie Gray because of O'Malley's zero-tolerance policy toward crime when he was mayor of Baltimore - even though he'd left City Hall eight years prior. This reporter pretty much set the tone for mainstream press coverage - what there was of it - of O'Malley's presidential campaign in its entire eight-month lifespan. That tone doomed O'Malley's chances and made Bernie Sanders Hillary's main primary competition, and Sanders was never going to win the nomination because he is not a Democrat. This led to Hillary winning the nomination and losing to Trump, as well as the end of O'Malley's viability as a candidate for elective office. 

The reporter's name was Olivia Nuzzi.

Olivia Nuzzi, only 32 years old as of this writing - her birthday is January 6 - was a wunderkind of political journalism when she began her career as a reporter in 2014 for the Daily Beast.  Her skills, her irreverence, and, let's face it, her good looks (a must for appearing on TV-news panel discussions)  made her a favorite among readers of the latest tidbits coming out of Washington, and she soon joined New York magazine as its Washington correspondent.  For seven years in that position, beginning in 2017, Nuzzi achieved accolades for her sharp, witty writing and seemed destined for Fran Leibowitz-style greatness.

Then the roof caved in.

In September 2024, then-CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy reported in his newsletter  that Nuzzi "engaged in an inappropriate relationship" with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had sought the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination against President Biden and who had been the subject of a profile story Nuzzi herself had written in November 2023.  Although the relationship was apparently platonic and mostly confined to e-mail correspondence - "emotional and digital in nature" was how an unidentified third party described it - Darcy reported that Nuzzi's relationship with Kennedy was a conflict of interest, and subsequent reports on their "digital affair" suggest that Nuzzi had given RFK Jr. advice and pointers on how to pursue his political ambitions - advice and pointers that may have been responsible for Kennedy occupying his current office.

Oliver Darcy didn't exactly stick the knife in Nuzzi the way comedian Hannibal Burris brought down Bill Cosby - it wasn't like Darcy had said, "You know she's a political courtesan, right?"  Darcy's character assassination was more detailed and more to the point of why this affair was a problem.  Nuzzi, he wrote,  was "one of the most high-profile journalists in America, and she arguably wrote one of the most consequential pieces of the 2024 campaign, which was about what she called the conspiracy of silence to protect Joe Biden. And given that readers did not know that this relationship was ongoing with RFK, it raises questions about conflict of interest, because RFK has been an active participant in the 2024 campaign."

New York magazine suspended Nuzzi and reviewed her work, concluding that it had "found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias" in her published writings, but added that "had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign."  And with that, and an apology to its readers for a violation of trust, New York published a statement that it and Nuzzi had "parted ways."   In other words, she was fired.

Fifteen days later, Donald Trump was returned to power, eventually giving RFK Jr. his current job.

But the show's not over yet, this one's a double feature.  Nuzzi has a new memoir out, "American Canto," a memoir of her relationship with the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, in which she attempts to gain sympathy from readers by, according to all of the reviews, turning the story of her love for Kennedy - a man old enough to be her father - into a tale of untold passion and star-crossed love. Or, as Helen Lewis of The Atlantic put it, "The language seems tortured by Nuzzi's efforts to rewrite her life-upending crush into a mutual whirlwind of passion, to turn herself from Ophelia into Juliet." Ophelia, of course, was the intended bride for Hamlet who drowned herself after the melancholy Dane drove her mad. I don't think I need to explain who Juliet is.

Anyway, weeding a one-acre Shakespeare garden is probably an easy task compared to get to understand Nuzzi's intentions and her perspective, which she attempted to explain in an interview she granted to the Bulwark's Tim Miller.  In the interview, available on YouTube, Nuzzi speaks in a confused, halting cadence.  She sidesteps questions about why she didn't warn people about RFK Jr.'s, uh, personality quirks (like his ketamine addiction), and she tries to act like a victim more like the accomplice she was.  And she goes on and on in this state of confusion for over an hour.   Once upon a time, Olivia Nuzzi was a reporter known for her sharp writing, and here, she comes across as being as sharp as a wet noodle.

You know, they say that beauty and brains are a great combination when you're seeking a relationship with a woman.  Olivia Nuzzi has beauty and brains, all right, but, ironically, her beauty got her in so much trouble that she forgot that she had brains.  Nothing demonstrates that more than her choice in men.  Not just RFK, Jr., but always men who are far too old for her, such as Keith Olbermann, who was 52 when she met the 18-year-old Nuzzi in 2001, and Ryan Lizza, who is the young'un of the trio of her lovers; he got engaged to her in 2022, when he was 48 and she was 29.  Lizza wrote pieces on his Substack about their relationship and their split in 2024.

I still remember Olivia Nuzzi as the woman who condemned Martin O'Malley to permanent also-ran status in the Democratic Party and set the pace for how thoroughly pundits could ridicule him.  I have no sympathy for her.  Period.  Stick a fork in her career; it's done.

The Most Dangerous Man In America

It's not Donald Trump.

It's his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose tenure in that post shows him to be incapable of delivering either.

You might have heard about the brouhaha in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, which is out of control.   The director of the CDC was forced out over a dispute over medical science - namely, her recognition of its existence.  This led to mass resignations at the CDC, and HHS employees back in Washington are calling for their boss to resign.

The chaos comes from Kennedy's vaccine recommendations, which themselves are chaotic.  On the particular question of COVID vaccines, Kennedy has declared that priority will be given to Americans 65 and over and those under 65 with underlying conditions.  And, as feared, it appears that any Americans who do not qualify for a free COVID shot under the guidelines will not be allowed to get one even if they're willing to pay out of pocket.  They are not available to anyone who doesn't qualify.  You'll have more luck trying to buy the bones of John Merrick, the Elephant Man, from the London Hospital Medical College, as Michael Jackson (a psychopath like RFK Jr.) had tried to do, even doubling his bid for them.  But, as he found out then and as those of us who want COVID shots but don't qualify under RFK Jr.'s rules are likely to find out, some things don't have a price.  (Ironically, Trump believes otherwise.)   

I have it on good authority that even now, if you try to make an online appointment for a COVID shot at certain pharmacy chains and are under 65 and have no underlying medical conditions, you'll be turned down automatically.  Kennedy, meanwhile, is likely to - just as automatically - fill his recently depleted vaccine advisory board with anti-vax wackos like himself.  This could mean no vaccines for anything being readily available (if available at all) in 2026.  Meanwhile, in Florida, state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who is black and is thus clearly a DEI hire, is ending vaccine mandates for children, comparing mandatory vaccinations to slavery.

But Dr. Ladapo, slavery taught American Negroes vital work skills!  Just ask the Caucasian who gave you your job, Florida governor Ron DeSantis - who has been trying to make that part of the state's standard school curriculum!  (Sarcasm.)

You know, that's another reason for me to hope that the 2028 Olympics get moved out of the U.S.  The war on medical science, which medical science is clearly losing, is going to lead to a lot of Americans with severe respiratory diseases, some of whom could possibly attend Olympic events in Los Angeles while being asymptomatic and cause a mass contagion among foreign athletes and spectators.  The Super Bowl, the most insufferably American of all sporting events, which takes place in the middle of winter, could also be an annual super-spreader event for COVID, the flu, and other nasty diseases.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been dismissed for his lack of medical expertise - he is, after all, an environmental lawyer.  But that alone is not a detriment in running the Department of Health and Human Services.  Xavier Becerra, his predecessor under President Biden, is also a lawyer, and he used his legal knowledge to cut through red tape and get COVID vaccines out as quickly as possible.  If anything, being an environmental lawyer is an asset; who better than an environmental lawyer to understand how toxins and pollutants in the air and in our soil affects our health?  But while Kennedy is best known for being an environmental lawyer, his reputation in the field of environmental law is based largely on easy-peasy cases he merely signed his name to, including cases that any shyster with a law degree from a correspondence course could have won. RFK Jr., who has campaigned for years against injecting kids with drugs, is, ironically, best known for something else; he's a recovered heroin addict.   And he's a recovered heroin addict who ignores the basics of medical science and whose anti-medical-science policies are going to get us all sick and cause a lot of us to die needless deaths. 

As far as getting a COVID shot is concerned, I propose that if you are under 65 and you want one badly enough - and who with a brain wouldn't?  - the safest course of action is to tell your local pharmacist that you do in fact have an underlying condition.  And trust me, you won't be lying.

The underlying condition we Americans have, whether or not we're 65 or older, is that Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. is the nation's Health and Human Services Secretary.    

The OTHER Unholy Trinity

The three riders of the apocalypse in the regime of Der Amerikanischer Führer are in place.  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is Secretary of Health and Human Services . . . 

Tulsi Gabbard is now Director of National Intelligence . . .

. . . and, as of today, February 20, 2025, Kashyap Patel is director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Helter skelter.

So, if you hope to survive Trump, good luck.  Because of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., you may have to deal with a disease that makes COVID look like the common cold.  If you survive that, Tulsi Gabbard may let a Russian operative poison you for having insulted Putin when Biden was President, or maybe there'll be a contract on your life for insulting Elon Musk that escapes her watch.  And if you end having to deal with Patel . . .

. . . you'll wish you'd been done in by one of the other threats.

They're coming down fast . . . yes, they are . . . yes, they are.

(Correction:  The above photo is not of Kashyap Patel.  The above photo is of James David Vance.  I regret the error.)

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I GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!

Trump's Nominees

I haven't been able to keep up with all of the revealing moments in the hearings for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and Kash Patel to be director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  So I can't tell you what happened.

I have to show you. 😟

This is really embarrassing for America . . .. 

Pardon the commercial announcement that Ben Meiselas includes in this video . . .. 

WHO Are We Now?

Trump pulled us out of an international agreement as expected, continuing an American tradition of refusing to join the rest of the world in interdependent global endeavors that are perceived to threaten U.S. sovereignty and American big business.

No, I'm not talking about pulling us out of the agreement on fighting climate change, which he did to the sound of cheering supporters who no longer have to worry about giving up their F-150 pickup trucks.  I'm talking about the executive order Trump signed that pulls us out of the World Health Organization.

Trump originally did that in the final year of his first term - 2020, the year of the COVID pandemic - insisting that China was paying too little to support the World Health Organization based on its population and that the United States was paying too much, and that the World Health Organization is in need of serious reform.  (Biden canceled the pullout.)  He's done it again for the same reasons.  Now, I don't know how much of that is true, but it was quite obvious that the organization bungled the response to COVID and let the Chinese hoodwink everyone - including Trump himself - into thinking they were on top of it, as this BBC report explains, and so some sort of reform at the organization (I'm not referring to it as "the WHO," it sounds like I'm talking about a rock band, though Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus's capitulation to Chinese President Xi Jinping in the early days of the COVID crisis could be punningly described as  "The WHO Sell Out") is needed.  So, by that criterion, Trump's order makes sense.

Or it would if he hadn't chosen someone to lead the Department of Health and Human Services whose main qualification for the job was living through birth. 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not a doctor but an environmental lawyer who should only be in Trump's White House to handle oil spills.  He opposes vaccines and is too skeptical toward pharmaceuticals without being skeptical enough toward pharmaceutical companies.  I sincerely hope that Senate Democrats oppose Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s confirmation to be Secretary of Health and Human Services with every fiber of their beings, but the lack of fiber Democrats have shown so far toward Trump Mark Two suggests that they tend to have too much Fruity Pebbles for breakfast and not enough Grape-Nuts.  In fact, kind of perversely, some Democratic U.S. Senators are interested in RFK Jr.'s attacks on Big Pharma and Big Agribusiness, and Cory Booker, New Jersey's senior senator, wants to learn more about Kennedy's ideas on improving the food supply.

Even if Kennedy gets us eating heathier food and has the Food and Drug Administration, an HHS agency, do something about additives like high fructose corn syrup, diseases still happen.  Eating wholly organic and natural foods didn't prevent the Black Plague in the Middle Ages.  By pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, Trump is incapacitating the international effort to control diseases and viruses - including the current bird flu wave - and making it more possible for another pandemic as bad as COVID to emerge. 

And then Kennedy will be fired.  Not for bungling the pandemic response, but for objecting to Trump's proposal to inject ourselves with cyanide or whatever.

RatFucKed dJ tRump

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ended his quixotic presidential candidacy and did something just as quixotic - he endorsed Trump.  

Kennedy will bring nothing to Trump's campaign.  Democrats drawn to the Kennedy brand who supported him over Joe Biden have mostly flocked to Kamala Harris.  Anti-vaccine voters were always going to go to Trump in the now-passed event that Kennedy dropped out of the campaign. Kennedy was already dropping in the polls, meaning that he wouldn't take away enough votes from anyone to make a difference if he had stayed in.  

If Kennedy benefits Trump at all, it's that he helps him with groups like the American Association of Clinically Insane falconers, book clubs that have recommended "101 Uses For a Dead Bear Cub," and the Decapitated Whale Heads Society.  Oh, and Brain Worm Survivors Anonymous.

Oh yeah, Tulsi Gabbard is supporting Trump too.  As if I really cared. 

America: The Nervous Breakdown Continues

The 2023 elections continued a winning streak for Democrats that began with Joe Biden's 2020 presidential election victory and continued with the midterm results of 2022.  Andy Beshear was re-elected governor of Kentucky, Democrats won both houses of Virginia's legislature and expanded their majorities in the houses of the New Jersey state legislature, and abortion rights were enshrined in the state constitution in Ohio.  Many people think the MAGA movement is in retreat at the polls.  Don't you believe it.

The Republicans still have the advantage going into 2024.  Forget the polls that show Trump ahead of Biden, and forget especially the greater number of polls that show Biden ahead of Trump, which Biden himself alluded in a testy exchange with a "reporter" from Fox "News."   Here are the basic reasons why 2024 is still in tap to be a Republican year:

• Democrats face strong headwinds to keep their Senate majority.
• U.S. House districts are still gerrymandered. 
• Many voter-suppression laws remain on the books.  
• Voter turnout in off-year elections is low and cannot be used as an effective barometer for midterm or presidential elections.
• The Electoral College can still negate the will of the people if they pick a Democratic President, as the 2016 election so clearly proved.
• Support for abortion rights in Republican states like Ohio do not automatically translate into support for Democratic candidates in statewide elections.

Change these conditions, and the Democratic Party's fortunes can improve.  But as such changes are not likely to happen, even the rosiest outlook on the economy might not save Biden this time.

And there's not just the threat of a third-party candidate playing the role of spoiler to help Trump.  There's the threat of four of them.  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is now a leading choice among young voters, and his anti-Semitic and anti-vaccine comments haven't hurt him as an independent candidate.  His appeal among young people might actually hurt Biden.  Cornel West has quit as the Green Party presidential nominee and continued to run as an independent, while Jill Stein - yes, the same Jill Stein who was the Green Party presidential nominee in 2016 and failed to win a 5 percent minimum of the vote to qualify the Green Party for matching funds in the 2020 presidential election - is taking his place on the Green ticket.  And the No Labels movement, which has promised to run a bipartisan presidential/vice presidential ticket, might have a presidential nominee in waiting in the form of Joe Manchin.

The senior senator from West Virginia announced that he will not seek re-election in 2024 and plans to tour the country to listen to voters needs - an obvious precursor to a presidential run, and possible as the No Labels candidate.  To be fair, No Labels' director, former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, has said that No Labels will not field a presidential ticket if researching and polling show that such a ticket would help Trump, but there will still be at least three other presidential candidates on the ballot who could and probably will screw things up for Joe Biden.

At least.  There could be more candidates.  Some people are still talking about Oprah Winfrey for President, while others are talking about her as a vice presidential No Labels candidate.  And still, waiting in the wings, and being taken very seriously, even by esteemed newsmen such as CNN's Jake Tapper, is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

Oh, honey, I think America is having a nervous breakdown like you wouldn't believe! 

Oh yeah, in Mississippi, Democrat Brandon Presley - a distant cousin of Elvis - lost his bid for the state's governorship to incumbent Republican Tate Reeves despite Reeves being tainted by scandal.  Brandon has just left the building.  Another Brandon is likely to leave the White House a year and change from now.

Lawrence O'Donnell on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

After seeing noted liar Robert F. Kennedy's testimony this past Thursday before the sycophantic MAGA Republican U.S. House members in their effort to smear the Democrats on censorship and government overreach, I wanted to say something in response.  Then I saw Lawrence O'Donnell's incendiary commentary on RFK, Jr. later that night, and I decided that I, as a writer, couldn't top that.

So here's O'Donnell's commentary. Take it away, Lawrence.

  

On His Way To Chicago . . .

 . . . and I hope he loses there.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a Democratic presidential candidate for 2024.  He's not running to rekindle the spirit of his father or of his Uncle Jack.  In fact . . . I don't know what he's running for.   According to his campaign's Web site, he plans to "focus his campaign on the values Americans hold in common, and lead the country toward an ethos of respectful dialog [sic] and reconciliation across races, parties, and divisions."

Well, fine, but what is he running for?

All I know for certain is that he believes all of those conspiracy theories about vaccines that MAGA Republicans relentlessly promoted during the COVID pandemic.  And I'm glad I can talk about the COVID pandemic in the past tense, because the mere possibility of an RFK Jr. Presidency during a pandemic would drive me to drink.

And I'm a teetotaler. 

It's not just his stand on vaccines, which he says also causes autism.   For one thing, he's against aid to Ukraine calling it part of a war against Russia - making him the perfect stooge for Vladimir Putin.  He also stepped into it big time when, at a Washington D.C. rally against COVID vaccination mandates in January 2022, he said, "Even in Hitler's Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did."

He sort of forgot that Anne Frank lost her fatal game of hide-and-seek and got sent to a death camp.  Though Kennedy apologized for his remark, his understanding of the Third Reich made his Grandpa Joe's comprehension of the same subject seem positively brilliant.

RFK Jr., of course, will not make it to the White House.  He is likely to have his much luck as his siblings Kathleen and Chris had in their bids for higher office (governor of Maryland and governor of Illinois, respectively). However, he's polling at 20 percent among Democratic primary voters, and so he could give President Biden a scare in the early Democratic primaries just like Eugene McCarthy did to President Johnson in 1968 and like Patrick Buchanan did to the first President Bush in 1992, and you know what happened to them.  Kennedy's relatively high polling, though, is likely based on name recognition . . . though it's ironic that, of all the failed Democratic presidential candidates of the past forty years who tried to emulate JFK or RFK - Gary Hart, Al Gore (in his 1988 campaign), Martin O'Malley, Pete Buttigieg - RFK Jr. is the least convincing of them by a wide margin.

I don't know, though.  I'd like to believe that people are not so misguided to support Kennedy for President . . . that people are not that dumb.  But then I saw this.

This is a picture of marchers getting ready to take part in an Independence Day parade in New Jersey, which I took myself.  Note the sign on the building in the background.  Click on the picture if you have to.

These jokes write themselves, folks! 😄