RFK Jr. Crazy Like a Fox? Or Just Plain Crazy?
What won't Americans believe?
Editor’s Note: Have a question about your child’s paternity? Don’t ask Matt, he’s not the father. And even if he is, he has enough school tuitions to pay off already. So he’ll never admit it. For all other questions, Ask Matt™ at askmattlabash@gmail.com.
Dear Matt,
RFK Jr. is prompting some very fond memories of several brilliant no-hoper profiles you wrote for The Weekly Standard. Do they defy comparison, or might we rank this guy among such genre titans as Marion Barry, Edwin Edwards, Jim Traficant? What if we include the pieces on Messrs. {Roger} Stone and Trump?
Kit T.
It’s hard for me to make straight-up comparisons. I have profiled all those others up close, spending plenty of quality time with them. I have never even met RFK Jr. (I know people who know him well, and speak fondly of him.) But with all those aforementioned former subjects of mine, even when I virulently disagreed with them, or thought them demagogues, outlaws, or con artists (often all three, simultaneously), they were, to the man, great showmen. They kept you feeling alert and alive, no matter how many hours of interview tape you had to slog through on the back end. Whereas, I watch a five-minute cable hit of RFK Jr. prattling on about one conspiracy or another, and I feel like I’ve washed down a half a bottle of Benadryl with a fifth of Old Grand-Dad. For a purported exciting outsider, he makes me feel less like, “Yes, we need new blood!” More like, “Yes, I need a long nap.”
Due to the spasmodic dysphonic croak that beset him in his forties, which causes his voice muscles to spasm, making the poor guy sound like a frog in a Cuisinart, Kennedy has self-deprecatingly said, “I cannot listen to myself on TV.” I know the feeling. Not because of his voice, but because of the actual words his voice forms. Whenever I hear him connect-the-dots in his latest nut rant, it makes me nostalgic for a simpler time. When I used to cover political conventions, and would have to jawbone with conspiracy theorists — often guys wearing sandwich boards with disheveled hair and suspect hygiene — they were usually in the protest pit outside the arena, not The Man In the Arena. Times have changed.