RFK Jr.
Leadership for a DC Reckoning
There exists, I am grateful to report, a substantial list of reasons why Bobby Kennedy is different from both Trump and Biden, reasons that, to one degree or another, make him a better candidate for president in these times of spiraling disgust with our media, our government, the surveillance state, the war machine, our tech overlords and the international attacks on our right to free speech.
A Monmouth University poll released in late March suggested sixty percent of Americans were either slightly enthused or not enthused at all about the major candidates. The Independent reported that one in six voters don’t like Trump or Biden, a number that could sway an election if added to a disaffected block of libertarians.
RFK Jr has an impressive list of victories over corporations whose reckless disregard for our wellbeing perpetrated environmental crimes, poisoned our food supply, or destroyed our bodies with poorly tested drugs pushed through the FDA by the insatiable C-Suite of the pharmaceutical industry.
Those on the right who would derisively call RFK Jr a radical environmentalist should take another look at American history and familiarize themselves with the definition of conserve. The current Republican party would be noxious to Teddy Roosevelt, known for his naval victory over Spain and his Roughrider battles in Cuba. Yet Teddy Roosevelt was strong on anti-trust and became known as the Conservation President for his establishment of National Parks and other efforts to preserve the natural beauty of this country. However, despite having earned all the prerequisites for a permanent man-card, alleged conservatives in the current Congress would call him a tree-hugger and anti-business.
Bobby Kennedy is a good man, a man of principle, a man whose extended family has chosen politics over decency, a man who is willing to go it alone because what he believes matters.
What we can say about Kennedy has been said exhaustively by his team and the growing queue of podcasters ready to give him time on a mic. It’s easy to speak of his famous name and inject some fugazi platitude about his ironic duty to serve a country that assassinated his uncle and father for the sin of their convictions.
What I could say about him would be lost in the echoes, but what we should say is more important. We should say he is the only candidate in modern times who has the potential to be a statesman and swing the gaze of the electorate away from divisive rhetoric and toward a man who could, if he chooses to, resurrect our certitude that we will one day leave our kids a better place to call home. I believe he has the capacity, but he must show the country why it needs a leader who has it.
Jerusalem
There is one major issue on which I disagree with RFK Jr. I believe if he were to consult his conscience, he might take a less strident defense of Israel and win the full support of anti-war libertarians and America’s raging youth, not for political expedience, but for the tired and poor our country is supposed to defend.
In his farewell address to the nation, George Washington said, “a passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils.”
That speech, written originally by James Madison and given a massive edit by Alexander Hamilton, is not prescient in the sense that the founders could have imagined the genocide in Gaza, but applies today because of the imprint of the hands of our founders on its expression of core American principles. Those principles are as evident in Washington’s speech as they are in The Constitution, the Federalist Papers and other documents conceived by the men who shaped, by quill and musket, the contours of American deliverance.
If Washington were alive today, he would have assailed Congress for its lustful attachment to Israel, and the legion of those who eschew common humanity for an alliance to a foreign state, while gleefully exhorting their ministers of death to “finish them,” with no accounting of, or sense of sorrow for, the souls of those so finished – those deficient in the manners of enmity, and their wives, and their children, whose piercing shrieks of pain from frail, battered bodies shaking in terror, have been witnessed by the world through our pocket lenses to war.
The AIPAC lobby has helped to foster among its puppets in the House and Senate a perverse relationship with Israel. The United States has other unshakeable alliances, but no other stirs the ferocity of temper and indignation than the holy-land allegiance to Israel. Those of us who don’t share this level of reverence for a foreign country are unfreighted by its malignant hostility and derive from our neutrality a measure of clarity.
President Washington warned that a nation, “which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”
Russia, China, Iran, Israel, The UK – habitual hatreds, habitual fondness.
Our duty, the duty of our elected representatives, is not only to the interests of American citizens, but to the steadfast adherence to our principles, hammered in war, but elucidated in peace, prosperity, and similitude, through the mechanism of juris prudence.
The recognition of the genocide in Gaza has moved well beyond the trends of a bored youth or an uninformed yet screeching defense by the woke of anything brown while ignoring the monstrous behavior of Sharia enforcers, the people who beat women in the streets because their faces aren’t properly covered. The protesters who ignore the crimes of Hamas are as ignorant as those who deny the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
The stench of genocide burns in the camps. Its American-made bombs scatter the leaflets that warned the displaced to move on empty stomachs to yet another hellscape of rubble and corpses. If rendering a state unlivable while forcing its inhabitants to choose either a swift and violent death or a slow, degrading, pernicious death of body and soul isn’t an ethnic cleansing, what is it? If the relentless barrage of artillery on a fleeing population and the blocking of basic humanitarian aid to their unsewered canvas coffins isn’t a genocide, then what shall we call this?
What can Bobby Kennedy say to himself as he wrestles with the imperatives of his faith and the reality of the mutual revulsion that is Israel and Palestine, locked in interminable war by the certainty of chronic hatred? Perhaps he can consider the words of his father, who said, in remarks to the Cleveland City Club in April of 1968, “We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear - only a common desire to retreat from each other - only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers.”
RFK Sr said we know what we must do. And today, Bobby Kennedy knows what he must do to overcome the intransigent support of Israel and the bloodlust in our Congress. We cannot continue in our enthusiasms to assert that every Palestinian is a either terrorist or praying for the annihilation of Jews. We cannot and must not continue to dehumanize a people because of the acts of the aberrant.
“We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all.” – RFK Sr. 1968
President Washington, whose views of international relations developed in the afterburn of combat, warned the future leaders of the United States against becoming too close to one nation or despising another.
“Sympathy for the favorite Nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite Nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the Nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained; and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.
President Washington continued, “And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens, (who devote themselves to the favorite nation,) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.”
Hamas perpetrated a despicable act of barbarism on October 7th, cowardly in its choice of targets and bereft of empathy for the lives and families they murdered or stole away. Israel has a right to strike back, but not with vengeance against an entire population, not by starvation, not by incinerating families in tents, not by pulverizing entire cites, including libraries and hospitals. Why should children pay such a horrific price for the sins of men they may have never known?
Back Home
Our DC politicians are the banks for the military industrial complex and our intelligence superstructure is the wizard behind the curtain, only this wizard is malevolent. He won’t award you courage or help you get home. The addiction to power and fear of the intel apparatus has birthed the Uniparty. That party wages illegal wars overseas and attempts to repress the inalienable freedoms of American citizens through mass surveillance and orchestrated campaigns of false media narratives.
And where is our current president? The West Wing handlers keep Felonious Monk in camera until they wire him up for a scripted interview with a Pravda-esque outlet with which the DNC is comfortable.
President Biden is only incrementally worse than Donald Trump, whose policies are as uncertain as the waters of the North Sea. He reads the room and adjusts accordingly, knowing that few people will look beyond the single-issue proscenium from which they view the world.
We need a leader who is prepared to confront the Cerberus of tyranny – the Military Industrial Complex, the Surveillance State and the complicit media who are all too eager to amplify official narratives and condemn anyone who dares to question them.
We can start by urging SCOTUS to overturn the Chevron Deference, often referred to as the Chevron Doctrine, a move that would help to declaw federal agencies who capriciously impose regulations over citizens without the probity of the legislative process. We can require the Pentagon to pass an audit or cut their budget by 30% every year until they do.
We don’t need polls to show the working class that our leadership has failed us again and again. We know the price of groceries and that hollow ache in our gut that says grinding it out day after day doesn’t feel worth it any more.
We don’t need think tanks to detail the many ways in which we have embarrassed our founders once more by violating the rules of international law we claim to support when it suits the neocon war machine or the lobby with the deepest pockets.
What we need is a leader who can restore our sense of pride in our Republic, a sense, once again, that America is the envy of the world, the pulsing star of open democracy shining on the individual liberty of every American. We need a leader who will fight back against those who would suffocate our natural right to freedom of expression and freedom of thought, free of accusations that every idea not certified by the censors is disinformation. It’s nothing more than oppression masquerading as compassion. It’s why Freedom of Speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment. If not for this critical right, the other amendments would be rendered lifeless without the waters of truth and reason that flow from unshackled minds.
“The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the Independence and Liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.” - George Washington
There is no liberty without humanity. There is no peace without dignity, no rights without respect. There is no future without hope.
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is today. The time to elect a statesman is now. The country we cherish doesn’t have another twenty years.