Holy god, this poor bastard has a medical history that makes him sound like one of Magellan’s sailors.

From Esquire, by Charles P. Pierce:

The New York Times took a deep dive on Tuesday into the medical history of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose raison d’etre as a presidential candidate is primarily based on crazy-assed Do Your Own Research vaccine denialism and the fact that the two major candidates are older than he is and, therefore, not up to the job, cognitively. Judging from the Times story, RFKJ needs to find himself some new raisons d’etre tout suite.

Several doctors noticed a dark spot on the younger Mr. Kennedy’s brain scans and concluded that he had a tumor, he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Kennedy was immediately scheduled for a procedure at Duke University Medical Center by the same surgeon who had operated on his uncle, he said. While packing for the trip, he said, he received a call from a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital who had a different opinion: Mr. Kennedy, he believed, had a dead parasite in his head. The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition.

Well, that sounds awful.

For decades, Mr. Kennedy suffered from atrial fibrillation, a common heartbeat abnormality that increases the risk of stroke or heart failure. He has been hospitalized at least four times for episodes, although in an interview with The Times this winter, he said he had not had an incident in more than a decade and believed the condition had disappeared. About the same time he learned of the parasite, he said, he was also diagnosed with mercury poisoning, most likely from ingesting too much fish containing the dangerous heavy metal, which can cause serious neurological issues. “I have cognitive problems, clearly,” he said in the 2012 deposition. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”

Mr. Kennedy said he was then subsisting on a diet heavy on predatory fish, notably tuna and perch, both known to have elevated mercury levels. In the interview with The Times, he said that he had experienced “severe brain fog” and had trouble retrieving words. Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who has railed against the dangers of mercury contamination in fish from coal-fired power plants, had his blood tested. He said the tests showed his mercury levels were 10 times what the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe.

Brainworms? Poisoned fish? Holy Lord, this poor bastard has a medical history that makes him sound like one of Magellan’s sailors. How did he avoid scurvy?

It’s easy to assume that the latter condition has played a serious role in his entire public life. His effort to clean up the country’s rivers concentrated heavily on the threat posed by mercury byproducts from coal-fired power plants. And, of course, his vaccine denialism began as a crusade against the mercury-based vaccine preservative Thiomersal, which was in fact removed from use by the Food and Drug Administration. Kennedy attached himself to the phantom threat of the preservative as a causal agent for autism, which discredited his warnings about mercury in vaccines generally.

His medical history is now a legitimate topic for political discussion because he chose to engage in long-distance diagnoses of the president. Every one of his verbal stumbles and every moment of public forgetfulness is going to be counted against his fitness for office because that’s the field on which he’s chosen to compete. Personally now, I think he should stop with the YouTube calisthenics and the TikTok iron-pumping and accept the fact that he’s not that much younger than the president is.

From Civil Discourse, by Joyce Vance:

An interesting side note: It was Jeffrey McConney’s son Justin, fresh out of film school, who was Trump’s first social media manager. Before he arrived on the scene, Trump didn’t know how to use social media. In 2013, Trump posted his first tweet, an innocuous thank-you to someone who complimented him publicly.

After leaving the company in 2017, Justin McConney said, “The moment I found out Trump could tweet himself was comparable to the moment in ‘Jurassic Park’ when Dr. Grant realized that velociraptors could open doors. I was like, ‘Oh no.’”

Conspiratorial Templates @mynamehear

Elise Stefanik, frustrated by lack of media attention, announces plans to murder kitten.

From The Bulwark, by Jonathan V. Last:

The piece is excellent and Cortellessa doesn’t both-sides, or horse-race the situation. He knows what time it is and his story is a public service for our democracy.

The question is whether or not The People care. I mean, in what country could voters read the following paragraph and still say, “Shit Lurleen, we needs more of that Trump feller.”

“To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

Understand, these aren’t the hysterical predictions of Never Trumpers or socialist antifa cucks. This is Trump’s own representation of his wishes.

From The Washington Post:

Asked by Time if states should monitor women’s pregnancies to detect whether they get abortions after a ban takes effect, Trump said: “I think they might do that.”

“Again, you’ll have to speak to the individual states,” he said. “Look, Roe v. Wade was all about bringing it back to the states.”

From Esquire, by Charles P. Pierce:

WASHINGTON—Some notebook leftovers from a bad day for democracy before the United States Supreme Court.

My Bad Faith Meter is broken, perhaps irretrievably. I sat there and listened to Justice Brett Kavanaugh spout off about the dangers of runaway special counsels, all the while remembering that he made his GOP bones working for Kenneth F*cking Starr and the Great Penis Chase of 1998. I also sat there and listened to Justice Sam Alito warn darkly of how future presidents could be imperiled if we held the most recent former president* liable for the crimes he committed against us all. I seemed to recall that, prior to the decision that Alito authored to strip women of privacy rights they’d enjoyed for a half century, people warned Alito and the rest of them about the potential consequences of doing that. With states running amok with anti-choice laws, the way they ran amok with voter-suppression laws after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, women would perhaps die of the complications of a difficult pregnancy. We would end up with a patchwork of state laws that would require women to cross several state lines in order to obtain the care they needed. Alito, caught up in searching out precedents from seventeenth-century British witch-hunting judges, didn’t let these predictions of what might happen in this century if he did what he said he was going to do. All of that stuff has come to pass.

Bad Historical Theater got quite a workout as well. Kavanaugh cited Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon as being “very controversial in the moment—hugely unpopular, probably why he lost in ’76. Now looked upon as one of the better decisions in presidential history, I think, by most people.” Uhhh, no. Recent polling saw support for the pardon drop like a stone as the last presidency* ground on, which really should have taught Kavanaugh…something.

But the wildest and furthest off-the-wall reference came from Justice Clarence Thomas, who referenced the possibility of John F. Kennedy’s being prosecuted for participating in Operation Mongoose when he left office in 1968. (Of course, as The New York Times dryly pointed out, JFK never had a chance to be a former president.) According to Thomas:

“Over the not-so-distant past…certain presidents have engaged in various activity, coups or operations like Operation Mongoose, when I was a teenager, and yet there were no prosecutions. Why? If what you’re saying is right, it would seem that would have been ripe for criminal prosecution of someone.”

Mongoose was a CIA-sponsored campaign of terrorism against Cuba in the 1960s. It was the CIA’s response to the collapse of the Bay of Pigs invasion. It involved crop burnings, industrial sabotage, and proposed assassinations, some of them immortally wacky. (Exploding sea shells. Exploding cigars. Poisoning Castro. Making his beard fall out.) The Kennedy brothers probably let this go on too long, but they suspended the program in 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted. Added historical note: There is considerable evidence that former Mongoosers may have been involved in the president’s murder a year later. This would have been an actual coup d’état. Thanks for the memories, Clarence.

From The New York Times, by Jamelle Bouie:

I wish I had faith that the Supreme Court would rule unanimously against Trump. But having heard the arguments — having listened to Justice Brett Kavanaugh worry that prosecution could hamper the president and having heard Justice Samuel Alito suggest that we would face a destabilizing future of politically motivated prosecutions if Trump were to find himself on the receiving end of the full force of the law — my sense is that the Republican-appointed majority will try to make some distinction between official and unofficial acts and remand the case back to the trial court for further review, delaying a trial even further.

Rather than grapple with the situation at hand — a defeated president worked with his allies to try to overturn the results of an election he lost, eventually summoning a mob to try to subvert the peaceful transfer of power — the Republican-appointed majority worried about hypothetical prosecutions against hypothetical presidents who might try to stay in office against the will of the people if they aren’t placed above the law.

It was a farce befitting the absurdity of the situation. Trump has asked the Supreme Court if he is, in effect, a king. And at least four members of the court, among them the so-called originalists, have said, in essence, that they’ll have to think about it.