Who Killed the Kennedys? After All, It Was Ted and Bob

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., feeble-minded nutjob:

America is misinformed, Kennedy maintains, because “right-wing” pundits and conservative media outlets “twist the news and deliberately deceive the public to advance their radical agenda,” while major media outlets sit silently complacent. No part of the mainstream media exposed “President Bush’s calamitous lies about Iraq, the budget, Medicare, education, and the environment,” he complains. The major networks failed to cover “real issues” during the campaign and — horror of horrors — Bob Schieffer asked no questions about the environment in the final debate.

Kennedy laments the "post-election decision to retire Dan Rather,” yet makes no mention of the overzealous anti-Bush “investigations” that led to Rather’s demise. Presumably Kennedy found Rather’s coverage of Bush’s National Guard Service a model of objectivity and balance.

Kennedy complains of a dearth of “strong progressive voices” on radio and TV, even though he’s a regular of the talk-show circuit. Kennedy repeatedly attacked the Bush administration during the 2004 campaign on everything from NPR to Fox News, often without challenge, let alone a contrasting view. Ironically he also calls for reviving the “Fairness Doctrine” in broadcast media, without considering that this would end his own free ride in major media outlets.

There is no liberal media bias in Kennedy’s view, but rather “lockstep coordination among right-wing political operatives and the press.” The mainstream media is too concerned with the bottom line to finance investigative reporting while “radical ideologues, faced with Niagara-sized flows of money . . . bombard the media with carefully honed messages justifying corporate profit-taking." Relying on Media Matters’s David Brock, Kennedy’s tale turns somewhat conspiratorial. Kennedy writes of a “propaganda machine” that “orchestrate[d] Clinton’s impeachment” and largely dictates the public agenda. The Washington Times is not just a conservative newspaper, but a key element in a plot to “establish America as a Fascist theocracy.” At stake, Kennedy warns, is nothing less than “democracy’s survival.”

This is why the estate tax is unnecessary: the blood of the aristocracy thins and corrupts over time, leading to finances being controlled by the terminally daft like RFK Jr. Let him blow his money saving Mississippi mud ducks and building solar power farms far from where they might offend his sight. The Kennedys have lost their juice, and their days ruling the roost in the Bay State kleptocracy are nearing their long-awaited end. Time pays all debts.