Hey, know what would be fun? Flagging the mods for a hijack!
JUST KIDDING MODS!
(Oh shit, this is another hijack.)
How did this thing about the bear come up anyhow? From the brief snippet I saw, RFK Jr posted it himself. At what point in the interview does he just decide now would be a good time to tell that story? Or did someone ask him “hey, did you ever do something really shitty that involves dead animals?” I did not think anyone was going to hear Kristi Noem’s stories and have a “hold my beer” moment.
Probably, they heard that someone who knew about the story was about to go public with it, so they released the news themselves so they could have some control over the spin.
I heard a reporter at Vanity Fair, I think, contacted him and asked if he wanted to make a statement about the story. So he decided to try to beat the story by telling a humorous tale with Roseanne Barr for public consumption.
It was the New Yorker. This article, in fact:
I’m curious how the reporter dug that story up. Decade-old unsolved mystery that they somehow connected to the guy. Maybe there were rumors of his involvement? Or one of his drunk friends let it slip somehow?
Thanks for the correction. He was with several people that day. Someone took that picture.
Maybe one of them doesn’t like him as much as he would like to think.
It was in the paper this morning. And CNN covered it.
Apparently the bear being found in the park was news of the day, back then.
(It seems his cousin, one of the Schlossbergs wrote an article about it back then, unawares. Heard that on CNN)
Indeed. I’ve spun off a new thread.
Those “surprisingly good poll numbers” The New Yorker cites have been dropping markedly.
https://www.axios.com/2024/08/04/rfk-jr-2024-election-harris-trump
It’s hard to see how the bear carcass embarrassment will hurt Junior significantly among his fans. They’ve already tolerated (or approve of) his loathsome antivax activities (that he’s lied about), 5G conspiracy theorizing, anti-Semitic crankery and denial that HIV causes AIDS (blaming the “gay lifestyle” instead).
Why would a dead baby bear “prank” by a 60-year-old former heroin addict bother them?
Amazing that this still ranks third in the “dead things in cars with a Kennedy, with ‘worst’ being #1” list.
So, back to P&E territory.
RFK Jr seems to have lost the claim to “young blood” in the election now that Harris is the Democratic candidate.
He’s probably lost all the Democratic voters who just wanted something different from Biden, and his positions seem limited to taking voters away from Trump (yes, he does have some cred on environmental issues, but he’s drowning it out with all his RWNJ points).
And of course, traditional third-party “A plague on both your houses” are still his for the taxing, although that group isn’t exactly known to be motivated to actually get out and vote.
So right now 5AUG2024 IMHO he’s probably a net benefit for Harris, as I suspect he’s taking more votes from Trump than her.
Of course, I’d be happy if he dropped out and said he was wrong (blame the worm) and that any voters supporting him should instead vote for Harris as the lesser of evils if nothing else.
Ya know? Sometimes I turn on the news, and see something soooo fucking strange, that I question if I’m really awake, or on some kind of Nyquil-induced fever-dream bad trip.
Unbearable at times. Other times, bear.
“But wait - there’s more!” pretty much summarizes everything now.
Wow, this story is even more bizarre than I could have imagined! Full details are in this Bulwark video where the hosts dunk on RFK Jr. for twenty minutes straight while going through the video line by line and pointing out the immense absurdities of this story:
I heard it this morning half asleep and thought “REMEMBER RFK BEAR” so I could double check later that I wasn’t dreaming.
You are a very bad person and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Oh, man, I can’t deal with watching a 20-min video on it. Any chance you could summarize any highlights?
The staging aspect makes the least sense. Not only was the scene he was trying to stage completely implausible (A bear cub in Central Park, killed by being hit by a bicyclist who then abandoned the bike at the scene), but it sounds like if he had just dumped the bear back on the shoulder where he found it he wouldn’t even have been doing anything illegal since he’s not the one who hit it.
Which reminds me of this thing:
Never get into a vehicle with a Kennedy! A watercraft is perhaps only the third-worst option after aircraft and automobile, but still.
They really lean into how, after a long day spent hiking and handling dead animals, he just goes to a fancy steak house with showering, spends some more time handling the dead bear cub to set up the “bicycle accident,” then drives directly to the airport to catch a flight. At which point, he must have smelled absolutely disgusting.