Sad what paranoid views sometimes appear even here on HN, where I go looking for wisdom, reason and calm.
I do hope we have our version of a Numenburg trials one day, but I also wouldn't be surprised if all these people squirm under the cracks once their near octogenarian rallying point declines.
> Bondi can still be charged. Hegseth can still be held liable.
[0] https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/05/27/trumps-budget-contemp...
You are right a lot of his actions can be (and have been) stopped via legal means. That's not so much democrats as individuals and groups with standing to bring suit. The dems can't really do much except fund the lawsuits which, again, don't threaten Trump in any way.
Case study -- Kazakhstan leader, Nazarbayev introduced all kinds of immunities before leaving. Didn't help later, all the titles and privileges got stripped. The only chance is to lose power and money and become harmless (and whole family as well), or get unreachable (keep the money).
PS: Autocrats like "small" wars, something that keeps people occupied and centralized. Not a large risky wars though, with unpredictable outcomes. "Small" is relative, e.g. for China a war with Taiwan very well might become "large", if India expresses an opinion on that. So they're reluctant to start it. For Russia, war with Ukraine anticipated to be "small", although grew up larger than expected.
So as I see it for Trump, a small war would be desirable, he envies Ukraine president, as they cannot conduct an election during war (and some territories occupied), that'd be nice for Trump.
My only solace right now is that Trump probably isn't in the health to survive to 2028, maybe not even 2027 to get potentially convicted if congress shifts. He's in worse wear in 2025 when Biden in 2024.
It's Republicans that think it's alright. Not "Congress". The Republicans just happen to control what happens in Congress - the Democrats are not complicit at all.
Trump can live as long as medically possible, which could be 10 or 20 more years, nobody really knows. Then Trump Jr. is going to take his place as the figurehead, and he'll probably win the next election if there is one. If Trump doesn't make it to the end of his term, we'll have President Vance and VP Miller, or maybe VP Trump Jr. It's not looking good no matter what happens.
Signed: A person with a disability, unable to support DEI as it stands.
Are the DEI bunch radicalized? I’m not sure I get that vibe. The people who riot and are radicalized probably aren’t out there understanding nuance, being level headed and campaigning for an even playing field.
If you can also expound on why you can’t support DEI as it stands I’m open to your thoughts. I have my own reservations about DEI because as a model minority it does me no favors. But it hasn’t harmed me either, or if it has I don’t know any better.
To your other question: I perceive DEI, and most other "inclusion" efforts I've seen so far, mostly as a strawman. We basically failed with digital accessibility and more inclusion in the workplace for people with disabilities. If I am not mistaken, the US and EU still stand somewhere around 80% unemployment for people with disabilities. To me, DEI is an attempt to hide that failure by including a lot more marginalized groups, which at the end of the day do not need so much adaptation as people with disabilities do. So IMO, DEI is trying to hide the fact that inclusion of people with disabilities has already failed. And its mixing up too many groups with different needs. I have absolutely nothing in common with a LGBTQ-person when it comes to my needs as a blind guy. There is no overlap, and I dont feel represented when they have their pride month. But they are so loud that the needs of my community have been silenced by now. Which confirms my intuition with DEI. Meanwhile, teachers are telling me they are working with their classes to find a new word for "disability". If that is the outcome of DEI, people endlessly engaging in wordgames, instead of working on the actual hard problems, I don't need anything from it. Its useless waste of time and dumbing down of the actual problems at hand.
Congratulations, you are being played. In the end, the Conservatives will destroy DEI and repress LGBTQ - and you won't have any more help as a blind person, because they never really cared and just manipulated you into hating "the gays" instead of hating them. Trump HATES you deeply, you know? He despises you, as a loser, a cripple, someone less-than-human. It is just that gay people are more politically active and visible, so they are more useful as a foe for his "two minutes of hate" - for now.
If you don't believe me:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-dei-target-a...
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2025/mar/27/us-disability...
https://time.com/7002003/donald-trump-disabled-americans-all...
“Those people . . . ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
Meanwhile while you froth at the mouth against the "DEI bunch", disabled people are ending unemployed en masse right this very moment, thanks to the crazy cuts to Federal Workforce - the only big employer who tried to do things right.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/24/dei-orders-disabled-workers...
No, I am not fighting anyone. I am just not willing to support the way DEI is going.
Equality is an illusion. Inclusion is a lie. Diversity is the only fact in the TLA.
> Congratulations, you are being played.
If you say so. So if someone is not willing to support your overboarding causes, that person is obviously being played by someone else? It is absolutely not possible they consider your crying inappropriate?
> because they never really cared and just manipulated you into hating "the gays" instead of hating them.
I agree, general society was never willing to spend real money on the issues of disability. On that point, we can agree.
However, the rest is your spiteful invention. I am not hating "the gays" at all. And I don't see why I should hate "them". Hating someone as you suggest is unhealthy, esp. for myself. I hope you learn that lesson one day. However, the rest of your writing is so full of hate and spite that I am not willing to engage in any further conversation with you.
In fact, your style of writing and accusing is one reason why I am not willing to support "your bunch" anymore.
Besides, if I had the chance to swap places with someone who thinks their gender identity issues are the worst thing that can happen to a human, I would do that anytime. Got it? No, still spiteful? I am not surprised.
"Il n'est pire aveugle que celui qui ne veut pas voir."
Yeah, right. I don't think this user ever wanted to support "that bunch".
Damn those extremists - don't they know how women got the vote, how racial segregation was ended and how persecution of gays by the police was addressed? They really need some civics lesson!
In comparison, it seems like we're almost at a point where all WW2 vets (the last time "white men" had to confront fascist behavior) have passed away. When's the last time America as a general unit has had to properly protest authority? The Boomers didn't seem to take the right lessons about Vietnam into account when they started taking the reigns.
That said, what people call DEI today is just a reformation of Maoism based in Marxism, and its goals follow hopes, and patterns that seek to engender social collectivist indoctrination in those subjected to it; following principles of thought reform/torture unironically also coming out of mainland China during Mao (1950s).
Its particularly effective against the habitually complacent.
The big trick of communism is to induce hope in people to narrow their focus to a circular but undefined viewpoint which can be falsely claimed as truth later, but which in reality lacks a property of what's called metaphysical objectivity in philosophy; an identity you need to prove anything through logic/critical thinking. This is how double-speak and double-think work.
It also takes advantage of a lot of psychological blindspots we all have (by purposeful design), just like any other cult programming.
Its important to note: Equity isn't equality, and its not properly defined.
If you want to learn more about blindspots, I'd suggest starting with Robert Cialdini (Influence). Robert Lifton covers case studies of actual torture mechanics which can be derived (elements, structuring, clustering), which use these blindspots (albeit this material came before Cialdini published back in the 1950s).
New Discourses covers the progression of DEI in damning detail albeit he sometimes becomes too wordy.
With any regime change playbook you inherently have two roles being played simultaneously by a single cohort. You have a subgroup of antagonists, who perform and carry out acts to inflame which then are used by the other role to create a unifying narrative/platform for influence and insurgency.
The fact that violence and rioting are occurring fairly often is sufficient evidence that DEI and its other forms have had some success as a memetic contagion.
The harm always comes at you sideways without any visibility or attribution being possible. Are you better off today than you were a decade ago? Could you imagine a decade ago police firing teargas and rubber bullets indiscriminately into a peaceful assembly, or people firebombing cars with molotov cocktails? Which came first?, none of the news is saying and all the public narratives lean towards omitted lies in one form or another.
No objective signals can be discernible or come out of channels jammed to the Shannon Limit.
People go absolutely insane when they cannot maintain an internal consistent narrative/mental state and this happens without them realizing it (subliminally), and its been known for quite a long time going all the way back to the 1800s with Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd.
Which side are you talking about now? Because according to [0], DEI violence is so rare that it doesn't even merit a mention in the statistics.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crime-statistics
They need riots to make their big play. I wish people got that, but unfortunately if you poke the right places you can get people to react.
Communism has always been about telling misleading deceitful lies pretending its truth, generating confusion through circular thoughts, promoting magical thinking, and narrowing focus improperly in isolation to perspectives of oppressor vs the oppressed, a perspective where there can never be equality, or the ability to change and become better/grow (i.e. The Woke, who are delusional).
The channel New Discourses on youtube has long-running coverage of this referencing these people's own publicized words, and what's been happening, and how it was rebranded by Paulo Freire and others a few decades ago.
When you have American companies and government resources going to paying for indoctrinating communism in your worker, educator, or child; and nothing has been being done to stop it... that's a serious problem which would be worthy of declaring martial law over. Failure to act is an action itself.
Communism indoctrinating and brainwashing your people towards lies, and turning them to insurgency is a serious national security issue.
You objectively aren't an American, if you don't follow the western philosophy's founding ideals laid out by our founding fathers, which was based first in objective truth, property, and a rule of law which itself has requirements codified in the constitution that no court can overrule or curtail and remain a rule of law.
The rule of law has been gone for awhile, which is how the communists have not been held to account. It was replaced by a surrogate "rule by law" which favors some small groups over others.
People are only just now realizing it.
Once the infection has spread too far, you've got to cut if you want a hope for survival. Whether that's good or it turns out to be another 1933 Germany, we will simply have to wait and see.
The cause though is irrefutably the result of communism breaking down the protections and destabilizing the system and front-of-line blocking any action from resolving the destabilizing influence.
What we are seeing are just the natural dynamics of fascism rising out of the dynamics caused by an attempted communist takeover.
Why it matters? Long-term, under non-market socialism, everyone dies from population constraint dependencies (food) where no production can occur. The population goes into a death spiral that cannot be averted because the dynamics of incentives prevent any change of direction which might pull away from that existential maelstrom.
It has long been known that Centralized power hierarchies fail predictably from failures inherent in its structure, which include corruption and front-of-line blocking to prevent action/adaptive response, and not just immediately, but over time as well through purposeful frameworks of false thinking.
Communists know this, and have used this for decades to weaken and destabilize over generations (a generation is 20 years).
Ludwig von Mises rigorously defines, and covers all the structural failures of Communism in his writing from the 1930s through to the 1960s.
These works have been aggregated into a single book since then by the Liberty Fund; titled "Socialism", and for all but two of the 23 chapters, its a damning failure analysis of the structure.
No rational person pins their and their families continued survival to system's known to fail.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectl...
"I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective."
N.B. from a logic perspective there's no conflict between "I would like this tech to work well" and "I don't think it works well [enough]" as positions, they're not mutually exclusive. Additionally, words like "safe" are relative. It's possible for a vaccine to avert more problems than they cause, whilst still creating sufficient damage that a reasonable person would consider them to be unsafe.
He then goes on to talk about the history of US vaccine legislation, which states that vaccine manufacturers are given blanket immunity for vaccines when they are "unavoidably unsafe", and that every vaccine is treated as immune under this rule.
This is a common point of confusion in discussion of vaccines. Most people make an ambient unstated assumption that vaccines are medical products and must therefore be safe, because otherwise they wouldn't be licensed. In fact US law considers them to products that inevitably by design make some healthy people sick or permanently disabled, and exempts them from the usual product safety rules as a consequence.
That RFK believes these things doesn't mean he wants to eliminate vaccines. You could at best argue for this indirectly, by arguing that he wants safety standards raised (put back) to the level that other treatments are held to, which would have the effect in practice of making vaccines unsellable, and thus that by implication he wants this outcome. But that is a tricky argument to make.
"I support safe vaccines, it just so happens that I don't believe that any vaccine is safe and I am not willing to trust the medical system to evaluate vaccines for safety and will continue to insist that all vaccines are unsafe" has the net effect of not supporting vaccination at all.
In practice, this is always what so-called anti-vaxxers believe. None of them actually oppose the concept of vaccines out of some kind of ideological principle. It's always specific concerns about actual, specific vaccines that exist in the real world.
That's being extremely generous, many people with anti-vax beliefs have not arrived there through careful, rational consideration of anything specific.
To be fair, same can be said of pro vax people. Blind belief into what science have become is perhaps more dangerous than blind disbelief.
It amounts to noticing that few if any of the people you know or are acquainted with through two or three removals from personal contact, have suffered or died as a result of using said technology, and basing your own confidence solely on this privileged form of hearsay.
It sounds like something that should not work, but actually does a pretty good job as a high-pass filter for safety.
"Vaccines could be safe if we can demonstrate that the moon is made of cheese" is the same as "vaccines are all unsafe."
And additionally, would you think it is a good idea to generalise here?
If you would dare to explore, you would find it's based on scientific approach, where trials and statistics matter.
It's going to boil down to what you mean by "safe". The way the word is used in vaccine approvals doesn't match how any normal person expects it to be used. If you go into a debate without being extremely well versed in the technical details, a guy like RFJ will crush you.
For example: most people assume vaccines are tested against an inert placebo like water, and will only be approved as safe if it doesn't cause more problems than the placebo does. This isn't what happens. The "placebo" in vaccine trials is usually another vaccine. This leads to the question of what happens if both are unsafe? The answer is the safety problem isn't detected and the FDA will approve the new vaccine as safe, because it didn't create a higher rate of problems than the older one did. And how was the older one approved? Well, by comparing it to yet another vaccine and so on.
One might assume this chain bottoms out somewhere against a real placebo, but not necessarily! There have been cases where two vaccines were tested against each other, and then both sides were declared safe based on comparisons with the other "placebo" meaning they end up selling the "placebo" as an effective vaccine in its own right. At no point is the vaccine tested against an actually neutral baseline. This is a very basic logic error that makes the evaluations unscientific, but public health officials accept it.
Did you know all the above already? If not then you have no chance at winning over a neutral audience against a guy like RFK Jr. He will argue no vaccines are safe, you will protest that such a belief is insane and preposterous, and then he'll do something like cite US law or Supreme Court judgements where the systematic unsafety of vaccines is taken as a legal axiom. Or pick a specific example and he'll cite specific studies off the top of his head showing you were wrong.
Watch the interview with Lex Fridman if you don't believe me he can do these things. Don't underestimate the guy!
I would also not want to debate someone who vehemently denies saying things he has recently said on tape.
And someone's ability to win a podcast debate is not my primary concern for public health policy.
The fact that he runs from his own statements is severely telling and disqualifies him for reasonable people. Not some in this thread, though.
As an example of what can go wrong, CNN failed to understand the point I was making here and screwed up very publicly. They tried to use "crowdsourcing" to gather counterpoints to an argument RFK Jr made, in fact, the one about trials not using inert placebos. In other words they gish-galloped him. In return they got a 1,330 word rebuttal that goes through their list showing, that none of the studies they claimed used inert placebos actually did (except a few that weren't used by the US anyway):
https://x.com/SecKennedy/status/1932580198198964241
CNN probably didn't expect this kind of takedown, they seem to model him as some sort of Trump of Health. That was their error.
The man who rejects germ theory in favor of miasma?
> Did you know all the above already?
I am aware that we do not do true placebo trials for vaccines, for good reasons.
Like when he said SARS-COV-2 targets some ethnicities or that Lyme is a bioweapon?
>For example: most people assume vaccines are tested against an inert placebo like water, and will only be approved as safe if it doesn't cause more problems than the placebo does. This isn't what happens. The "placebo" in vaccine trials is usually another vaccine. This leads to the question of what happens if both are unsafe?
That doesn't happen because if you get to how that "another vaccine" was tested, it was against a placebo - or another, even more ancient vaccine, etc... Until you get a test against a placebo.
And because all along the chain, every new treatment was proven to be better than the previous one, the latest can only be better than a placebo.
And no, re-testing against a placebo now isn't going to show anything revolutionary: what you will only manage to do is denying children any standard of care and expose them to death and injury. All because "most people assume vaccines are tested against an inert placebo" instead of educating themselves on statistics and the history of medical testing.
None of these assumptions is sound. The assurance people want from the medical system isn't "taking this is only slightly less safe than taking that", it's "taking this is safe relative to doing nothing", because doing nothing is the default state.
> All because "most people assume vaccines are tested against an inert placebo" instead of educating themselves on statistics and the history of medical testing.
The FDA itself defines a placebo as an inert substance and tells people vaccines are tested against placebos, even though they aren't by their own definitions. They don't get to play games like that and then tell people they should have "done their own research" to catch them in the act.
>"taking this is only slightly less safe than taking that"
is absolutely not what the medical system is saying. Like, at all. You write bull. That doesn't work on me.
>even though they aren't by their own definitions
COVID vaccines were tested against placebos. The polio vaccine was tested against placebo; children died or were left disabled.
In fact, all childhood vaccines were tested against placebos.[0]
You are either an idiot parroting bullshit, or a liar and an accomplice to medical malpractice. Shame on you.
[0]https://www.voicesforvaccines.org/jtf_topics/why-arent-vacci... https://medium.com/@jsteier_29203/all-childhood-vaccines-wer... https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/05/health/vaccine-placebo-st...
First, please consider from where and whom you received this information. It was probably RFK Jr. or someone on social media or maybe a news article, right? Did you bother to scrutinize that information? Because it's not true. All vaccines (like other medications) are tested against the standard of care. For a first-in-class vaccine, that's going to be a saline placebo because there is no standard of care yet; for subsequent vaccines, it will whatever is the current vaccine. This is completely sensible. The idea that the vaccines on the market now were never tested against saline placebo is mis/disinformation promulgated by a lawyer whose name escapes me; some of those saline placebo-controlled trials for vaccines are listed [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pUMNBewb0kgTU7g3augmOtPG...).
If you have a passing understanding of common anti-vaxx talking points, RFK Jr.'s arguments are easy to debunk.
Or rephrased, "that's not happening and it's good that it is". This kind of thing is called the Law Of Salutary Contradiction [1] and originates in confused, ideological thinking. If you want to argue with RFK Jr about something you need to decide if what he's saying isn't true, or if it is true but you disagree it's a problem. You can't pick both.
The "first in class" approach isn't illogical but it's an ultra-high risk strategy. If just one unsafe vaccine gets through the systerm that will lead to a chain of erroneous approvals that result in dangerous substances being labelled as safe. In other words it only seems completely sensible if you have absolute and total faith in the entire testing and regulatory infrastructure. Anyone who lacks your iron-clad faith will view this practice as obviously crazy.
Given that the medical profession have routinely lied as a group about many things in the past, it is unreasonable to use practices that demand quasi-religious faith in them. They refused to accept this and are now paying the price.
[1] https://americanmind.org/salvo/thats-not-happening-and-its-g...
How are you qualifying this strategy as "ultra-high risk"? How well do you understand the new drug and vaccine regulatory process in the US? An "unsafe" (vague) vaccine will be discovered via postmarketing surveillance (e.g. Rotashield). If two unsafe vaccines are trialed comparatively and the adverse event rate is unusually high for both groups than what was previously reported, that's not going to go unnoticed even if it appears like there's no significant difference between the two statistically. Your concern also assumes that because the first approval was erroneous that all subsequent ones will be too, which is an unfounded assumption.
If you want to claim that the medical profession have "routinely lied as a group about many things in the past", you'll have to back that up because I don't agree and will not accept your assertion at face value.
1. We used known safe and effective vaccines as placebos. Keyword KNOWN. We're not gonna debate the efficacy of the fucking polio vaccine, just be for real.
2. The reason we do this is because it's very unethical to deny medication that we currently administer and know works to human subjects. That would be treating people worse than we treat the general population. That's unethical.
3. We don't just do this vaccines, but ALL medication. When we make new drugs to treat cancer, we don't compare them against saline. Because that's evil. We compare them against known effective chemotherapy regimes.
4. All of this is besides the point, because using an inert placebo wouldn't help anything. How does using an inert placebo make a new medication more effective or more safe? It doesn't.
5. We DO use inert placebos all the time - just not in human trials. Because we want to give humans real medicine so they don't fucking die.
People who are given placebos in trials aren't "denied medication". They can always take it after the trial has ended and they're unblinded, if the trial succeeds.
> How does using an inert placebo make a new medication more effective or more safe?
Imagine - bear with me here - imagine that an unsafe vaccine got approved. It uses some technology that's unsafe. We know this happens because vaccines are sometimes pulled from the market for being unsafe after approval.
Now imagine you have a second vaccine in trial, which shares some technology with the first, and it gets tested against the first before it's realized that was unsafe. People suffer or even die but the FDA declares it to be perfectly safe because the control group are suffering at the same rate, and for the same reasons.
Now consider what happens when it's discovered by the population that the government claimed a vaccine was safe but it was actually hurting people, and those who never took it at all were better off. It destroys their trust in the system of course.
That's why you have to use inert placebos. There's nothing unethical about this. It's a standard safety precaution. The alternative, as you are now discovering, is that the entire system is torn down and one day there may be no vaccines at all - banned by constitutional amendment - because the sort of people who are pro-vaccine kept making false claims about safety due to dangerously optimistic testing practices.
This isn't true.
We do use inert placebos, but for some medications, we are not going to be doing that in human trials for obvious safety and ethical concerns. Keep in mind: we do NOT just jump to human trials. We also do cellular trials and animal trials.
Again, if we're trying out a new cancer drug, we're not going to give the control group saline - we're going to give them a chemotherapy regime that we know works. I don't understand what's not clicking for you because it's actually very simple and intuitive.
And, as an aside: the government has not recommended any vaccines that are unsafe. You may feel the COVID vaccines were not safe. That doesn't mean they're unsafe. In addition, there are numerous reasons why a medication might be pulled, and it's quite rare that the reason is safety in absolute. Some medication may be less safe than another so we obsolesce said medication - but even that does not mean that it is unsafe. Just inferior.
With any medication, or in fact any substance, including even water, there are risks. We're generally very aware of the risk before the medication is administered and we work to minimize them in various ways. The simple reality is that dozens have vaccines have worked together to eradicate many diseases in the US, and these health initiatives have been very successful. Other countries are not so lucky, so they are dealing with diseases that we haven't touched in decades.
Please bare in mind that viruses and bacteria are not risk-free, nor are they necessarily the type of thing you can just recover from. For example, about 2% of people who contract Polio will develop paralysis. 2% is extraordinarily high. Just because you might be fine, or you know people who are fine, doesn't mean that the disease is low-risk. With COVID specifically, we're still uncovering long-term effects of infection. With viruses like HSV, we're also uncovering long-term effects like increased risk of cancer and potentially dementia.
Just because you get sick and seem to recover, doesn't mean that what happened was safe and done.
Vaccines provide acquired immunity. And that happens only with a weakened or killed antigen. With everyone being different that means there is no 100% effective vaccine. It is only people like RFK who spread this disinformation.
Then there is the history of US vaccine legislation. He often misinforms people about it too. The legislation was put in place in the 1980s because the DPT vaccine was suggested to cause brain injury. When lawsuits piled up some vaccine makers stopped producing vaccines altogether to avoid being liable. Without insurance prices skyrocketed and no one could get the and hence the law was put in place under Ronald Reagan.
Even with this law there are alternatives to getting compensated. So, the whole point is one big disinformation.
The common point of confusion between people who spread this disinformation about RFK's position is that they are either arguing in bad faith or misinformed at best.
If the standards are "raised", then novel vaccines are going to be impossible in US because we are back at square one. Manufacturers cannot get liability insurance for the new vaccines and hence need to be very wary about producing these vaccines, lest they get sued.
It is often said that people should learn from history. But people in RFK's orbit seem to want to test history for themselves.
And for the sake of clarity Samoa tried RFK's approach and here's what happened: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
But then RFK being the politician he is, distanced himself from the situation. I am sure he is going to do the same once things don't work out. So, everyone should put their health in hands of someone who has never taken responsibility for his actions and words but demands higher standards from others.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/rfk-jr-s-anti-vaccine...
Ted Kennedy was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times. There was a campaign for each one of his terms and he won. Not so much "hired" as "elected." If the Republicans of that era could have unseated him, I presume they would have. In fact, the question that you may do better to ask is, "why couldn't a conservative in Massachusetts unseat someone with that much baggage?"
RFK and Pete Hegseth, whom I presume the earlier poster was alluding to because of his confirmed alcoholism, were appointed by the current President and confirmed by the Senate. There was no campaign and they were approved largely along party lines, which is more akin to "hiring" and that is an obviously less exhaustive process.
I can only assume that your connection to this was, "haha booze... Ted Kennedy!" Maybe you could graduate to parroting a different joke from Rush Limbaugh? Why don't you sample something from the "I do not think that 12-year old Chelsea Clinton is attractive" section?"
Not surprising!
> Ted Kennedy was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times.
Massachusetts voters condoned Chappaquiddick. He was still a drunk and worse. Ted Kennedy was never able to overcome Chappaquiddick when running on a national level. There's no doubt that the Chappaquiddick incident was one of the primary reasons he lost the 1980 primary, when he had his best chance of succeeding.
> If the Republicans of that era could have unseated him, I presume they would have.
Why? Massachusetts voters are overwhelmingly Democrats, and all sorts of disgusting characters like Ted Kennedy are elected to high office. The Democrat voters of Massachusetts were willing to overlook Chappaquiddick and that's all there is to it.
> RFK and Pete Hegseth, whom I presume the earlier poster was alluding to because of his confirmed alcoholism, were appointed by the current President and confirmed by the Senate. There was no campaign and they were approved largely along party lines, which is more akin to "hiring" and that is an obviously less exhaustive process.
Again, this only hurts the original argument. Hegseth and RFK Jr. are mere appointments. Neither of them to my knowledge has done anything as heinous as what Ted Kennedy did at Chappaquiddick but let's assume they did. Every few years Massachusetts voters spoke loudly and clearly, affirming their support for someone who drove so drunk that a woman was killed as a result. So the DUI snark above is kind of a joke, and deserves a response.
Heck you could argue that the national scrutiny that Hegseth and RFK Jr. faced was much more of a vetting than Ted Kennedy received in his machine state, but whatever.
> I can only assume that your connection to this was, "haha booze... Ted Kennedy!"
The truth hurts. If Democrats didn't want to defend Ted Kennedy they shouldn't have elected him. I happen to be fond of drinkers who don't kill people. Honestly I care much more about the fact that he abandoned Mary Jo Kopechne to die, and that he received special treatment in court.
> Maybe you could graduate to parroting a different joke from Rush Limbaugh? Why don't you sample something from the "I do not think that 12-year old Chelsea Clinton is attractive" section?"
The most famous example of a joke at Chelsea Clinton's expense was told by John McCain, who stated that the reason for her ugliness was the fact that her father was Janet Reno. John McCain was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times.
thats not wrong, look what the US was willing to overlook in 2016 and 2024 when electing our president lol! I do think the US should take the DUI thing more seriously but the trouble is that in many areas a car is central to ones very economic existence.
>The most famous example of a joke at Chelsea Clinton's expense was told by John McCain, who stated that the reason for her ugliness was the fact that her father was Janet Reno. John McCain was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times.
poor Chelsea lol I still did not totally dislike McCain like I do trump and his boyfriend musk.