RFK, Jr. Is Crazy

Many conservatives, including me, have hailed Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s entry into the presidential race. There is no way Kennedy can win the Democratic nomination, but if he gets a little traction, it may open the door to other challengers and precipitate the decrepit Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

And Kennedy has made sensible comments on several issues since entering the race. His longstanding anti-vaxxer stance has until now been seen as beyond the pale, but it has taken on new respectability with what is widely perceived as the failure of the anti-covid vaccines.

And yet…RFK, Jr. is nuts:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doubled down Monday night on his claim that the Central Intelligence Agency was behind the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.
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“There’s millions of pages of documents — of, uh, CIA documents, of, uh, transcripts, of recorded conversations from, uh, the Cuban embassy in, in Mexico City, from — it’s hard to summarize the evidence,” Kennedy, 69, told host Sean Hannity.

Yes, there are millions of pages of documents. And they contain not a shred of support for the Left’s conspiracy theories. There are recorded conversations from the Cuban embassy in Mexico City because Lee Oswald, a Communist who thought the USSR had gone soft, went there in an attempt to contact his hero Fidel Castro.

“There are confessions of people who are directly involved in the plot, who were involved in the planning of the plot, uh, who were peripherals to the plot, uh, there’s a 60-year cover-up,” he continued.

This is frankly insane. There may well be people who have confessed to murdering JFK, or to being involved in a plot to do so. In even the most prosaic murder investigations, it is common for people who are more or less deranged to contact the police and swear that they did it. It happens all the time, obviously more so in connection with one of history’s most famous murders.

This is not just ridiculous but reprehensible:

RFK Jr. claimed to remember that his father’s first call after receiving the news of his brother’s assassination was to CIA officials, asking them if they were responsible.

“It was my father’s first instinct that the agency had killed his brother,” said Kennedy.

RFK, Jr. was nine years old at the time, and unlikely to be listening in on such a phone call. More fundamentally, the idea that his father called the CIA (who, exactly?) to ask whether the Agency was behind JFK’s death, is ridiculous.

Kennedy also denies that Sirhan Sirhan murdered his father:

Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-born Jordanian citizen, was convicted of the murder and is serving a life sentence.

RFK Jr. called for that murder investigation to be reopened in 2018 and for Sirhan to be paroled.

“Anybody who reads the autopsy report is — it’s hard to believe that Sirhan shot my dad, that his bullets hit my dad,” he told CBS News at the time. “Because Sirhan was always in front of my father … And yet, all shots, all the four shots that hit my father came from behind him.”

Sirhan’s murder took place in front of many witnesses, some of whom (including NFL star Roosevelt Grier) immediately wrestled him to the ground, gun in hand.

Lee Oswald’s killing of John Kennedy is probably the most thoroughly-understood event in the history of the world. Oswald did it. There is zero question about that. If you harbor any doubt, read Conspiracy of One by Jim Moore or Case Closed by Gerald Posner. The case against Oswald is conclusive, and after all these years, there is zero evidence of involvement by anyone else, let alone the CIA. And to claim that someone other than Sirhan Sirhan murdered Bobby Kennedy is bonkers.

But that is where we are in American political life. It is fine to applaud Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s challenge to Slow Joe Biden, but let’s not forget that Kennedy is nuts.