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Saturday, October 07, 2023

Lyndon Johnson had Bobby Kennedy running against him. A new generation, a similar thing, but no CPAC back then.

 

screen capture from Guardian
 

No CPAC then. Bobby ran Democratic Party. Now, Jr. goes Independent.

Who'd have imagined . . . Guardian wrote:

A claim that Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews have greater immunity from Covid caused huge controversy. So did a comparison of government public health mandates to laws in Nazi Germany, invoking the name of Anne Frank. Last month, Kennedy repeated a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks on New York.

Kennedy has polled relatively strongly against Joe Biden, the incumbent Democratic president. Standing next to no chance of winning the nomination, however, Kennedy’s announcement of an independent run was trailed last week. The announcement is set for Philadelphia on Monday.

Polling shows the potential for a third-party candidate to pull votes from both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the president’s expected challenger in what would be a contest between aging and unpopular candidates.

This week, a Reuters-Ipsos poll showed Kennedy “could draw the support of about one in seven US voters”.

Some observers think Biden likely to sustain worse damage from a strong third-party candidate, perhaps handing the White House back to Trump: a twice-impeached ex-president who faces 91 criminal charges, 17 over election subversion culminating in the January 6 attack on Congress, as well as assorted civil trials.

Nonetheless, Kennedy’s links to rightwingers including the mega-donor Timothy Mellon and Steve Bannon, a close Trump ally, have been widely reported and his more extreme stances could also attract support from Republicans.

Bannon was among other figures listed to appear at the CPAC Las Vegas event. So were Ric Grenell, a former Trump aide; Kari Lake, a failed gubernatorial candidate now running for US Senate in Arizona; the Utah Republican senator Mike Lee; and Ken Paxton, the impeached and acquitted Texas attorney general.

You have got to be kidding me. Next really stupid thing folks will be saying is Jim Jordan could be Speaker of the House, and his backers were behind Matt Gaetz and the Gaetz putsch. Come on. It's all a joke? Right? This stuff can't be true.