RFK Jr. Fixing To Screw Up His One Not-Crappy Goal
Medical professionals are worried he'll set back years of work on treating diabetes and obesity.
Amidst all his decidedly wrong and occasionally deadly yammer about vaccines, raw milk, antidepressants, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, chelating, fluoridated water, autism, peptides, nutritional supplements, vitamins, chemtrails, mental health, ADD, drug addiction, proper disposal of bear and whale corpses, COVID being engineered to spare Jewish people, and Lord only knows what other nuggets of bad science and misinformed opinions rolling around in his skull like marbles in an earthquake, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has one goal that — dare we say it — we actually agree with.
Bobby Chemtrails would like to reduce the rates of obesity and diabetes in America by getting Americans to eat healthier and exercise more. This is a laudable goal! So laudable that we agreed with Michelle Obama when she made the same goal her major policy focus during her husband’s administration approximately 173 years ago. Of course we remember how that went over with Republicans back then, but times have changed. For one thing, the GOP is in power now. For another … wait, no, that’s it.
The problem with RFK Jr.’s interest here is that, as with every other goddamn thing he ever talks about, he sounds like such a lunatic and is so confidently wrong in his pronouncements that medical professionals and public health officials are worried about his plans for getting us slothful Americans off our couches and on to our Pelotons.
CNN has a story about RFK Jr.’s thoughts about popular weight loss drugs like Ozempic and his strident opposition to using them, despite all evidence indicating they are safe and effective. This isn’t the 1960s anymore, Bobby, and housewives are not gobbling amphetamines by the fistful while their husbands and kids are out of the house:
Kennedy claimed that Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, doesn’t market the medicine in its home country of Denmark, where “they do not recommend it for diabetes or obesity; they recommend dietary and behavioral changes.”
In fact, Denmark does use Ozempic, so much so that the Danish Medicines Agency said in May that it would restrict its use until after people had tried less expensive medications to treat diabetes.
We love this guy, he’s like if the buzzer they hit when you get an answer wrong on “Family Feud” became sentient.
Kennedy also claimed that the European Union is monitoring Ozempic to see if it causes “suicidal ideation,” when in fact the EU decided seven months ago that it does not. Our own Food and Drug Administration, which he will oversee, came to the same conclusion.
We’re imagining Kennedy’s first day on the job, proudly marching in to the FDA’s offices and telling the horrified scientists that AKSHUALLY, he knows what he knows, therefore Ozempic is bad.
Kennedy claimed in the same Fox segment that if the US spent a fraction of what it would cost to treat every overweight person in the US with Ozempic — not something anyone’s suggesting, as GLP-1 drugs aren’t approved for everyone who’s overweight — on “giving good food, three meals a day to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight.”
Giving food to people? That sounds suspiciously like socialism to us, and we know how the Republicans with whom Bobby Chemtrails has cast his lot feel about socialism. We also assume, in addition to everything else stupid and unworkable about this idea, that it will run headlong into the Trump administration’s plan to screw up SNAP benefits in order to balance out the huge tax cuts it plans on giving wealthy people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Just in case RFK Jr. can’t do it overnight, Trump has given our future HHS Secretary two years to show “measurable improvements” in obesity and diabetes rates, so he better get cracking.
Meanwhile, doctors are very, very annoyed at RFK Jr. for his flip assertions that all he has to do to cure the obesity crisis is make sure all Americans are eating plenty of salad. As anyone who has struggled with their weight knows, it can be more complicated than simply changing your diet and your exercise habits. Which is why health professionals have spent years trying to find other complementary ways to address the issue:
“We’ve been trying to bust that stigma a lot of years,” Fitch told CNN. “What we’ve heard a lot of in his rhetoric is, ‘I want people to just eat less and exercise more.’ And what we know is, that doesn’t work.”
Still, some people who should know better want us to give this nutball a chance. People like Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who already stepped into one controversy when he praised Trump’s selection of RFK Jr. and lauded how he helped Colorado “defeat vaccine mandates,” and then decided the way out was to double down like a champ:
“His (sometimes bizarre) personal opinions”? What do you mean, “sometimes”? All of his personal opinions are bizarre! The one Polis likes about better diet and exercise for Americans is the only not-bizarre RFK Jr. opinion we have rolled across.
Kennedy may also have shot whatever tiny shards of credibility he had on this issue when someone posted a picture over the weekend of him gorging on McDonald’s with Trump, his oldest failson, and Elon Musk over the weekend:
Man, the expression on RFK Jr.’s face. During Trump’s first run for president, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo came up with the concept of the “dignity wraith.” Essentially this was the idea that no matter how noble the cause for which someone would bend the knee to Trump, doing so would wreck their credibility and reputation.
Getting such a proclaimed healthy-living guy to chow down on a McDonald’s cholesterol bomb? That picture is RFK Jr.’s dignity wraith moment.
[CNN]
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We're getting an idiocracy. Run by drug addled buffoons, narcissists and obsessives.
I've only just realized that Trump's smile in the McDonalds photo almost precisely matches the one he's wearing in his dinner photo with Mittens way back when. This is the closest expression to joy I've ever seen on him, at it comes at moments when he's humiliating a former opponent or critic.
It so happens to also be his strongest single governing principle - humiliate critics, by any means necessary. He's such a yawning abyss of neediness, even the Presidency doesn't make him feel sufficiently in control.