By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Nellie Bly in Washington
Among the many beloved features of The New York Times, in addition to its toxic stew of white op-ed columnists and its habit of selling section fronts on Sunday to flacks trying to wrangle some free publicity for their washed-up clients, is its weekly news quiz.
We don't have an original idea in our heads, so we thought we'd try one ourselves.
Here it is: What do three of the biggest white male threats to democracy have in common?
Answer below.
But to help you, let's introduce the three schmucks in question.
Our first threat is a household name, sort of, not because of anything he did, but because he is a survivor of America's greatest political dynasty. Say hello to Bobby Kennedy, Jr.!
Bobby's running for President. Like his dad. Unlike his dad, who ran on a platform of social justice, Bobby Jr. is relying on lethal anti-vax drivel, plus spouting insane pro-Putin talking points. In 2023 America, that's a crowd pleaser, at least if the crowd is drawn from the Republican base.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of a US Attorney General and nephew of a president, has turned the Kennedy legacy upside down. Beginning in 2003, RFK Jr. abandoned his promising career as an environmental advocate to embrace the libertarian agenda of anti-vaccine and anti-science activism—a fascinating and dangerous U-turn from self-sacrifice to self-serving.
There are a lot of self-serving politicians out there. But only a few have embraced ideas that have led to the deaths of countless innocents (Although to be sure George W. Bush qualifies in that league and may even top the table.):
[Bobby] Kennedy[, Jr.] continued to spread anti-vaccine hysteria, emerging as a walking public health hazard. In June 2019 he visited Samoa, appearing in public with a prominent local anti-vaccination figure.
By that September, the island nation was in the grip of a measles outbreak that eventually took the lives of more than 80 people. Experts blamed the outbreak on a sharp drop in measles vaccination rates, which had fallen to about 34% in 2018 from 74% the year before.
While the epidemic was still in full cry that November, Kennedy wrote to the Samoan prime minister denying that the outbreak could be blamed on "the so-called 'anti-vaccine' movement," and pointed his finger instead at "a defective vaccine" that failed to target a "mutated" virus and allowed it to spread to children.
"It is a regrettable possibility that these children are [casualties] of Merck's vaccine," he wrote. The veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski described the letter as "a masterpiece of antivaccine dissembling, misinformation, distortion, and lies," seemingly aimed at providing cover for anti-vaccine quacks trying to deflect responsibility for "discouraging people from vaccinating their children."
The grief-stricken parents of Samoa must be excited about Bobby's candidacy.
It's no wonder that the greatest support for Bobby's candidacy comes from Republican plug-uglies and social media hacks with a demonstrated record of subverting American democracy:
This week RFK Jr., with the blessing of no less than agent provocateur Steve Bannon filed papers with the Federal Election Commission stating his intent to oppose President Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic Presidential Nomination,
And of course the perpetually clueless forced-birther Ross Douthat believes that the remedy for Bobby's toxic anti-vax insanity is to debate him [link removed due to pisspoor content], which would of course not at all have the paradoxical effect of bringing his drivel to a broader audience of stooges.
If you are so interested in hearing Bobby's ravings you will have an opportunity to do so at this no doubt Chautauqua-like event:
Moms for Liberty being of course the extremist anti-knowledge hate mongers financed by Charlie Koch and other great plutocratic contributors to fair and free debate.
The Republicans behind Bobby's campaign intend to use him as a spoiler to take a bite out of Joe Biden in the hopes that it will be sufficient to peel off enough Jill Stein voters to rig the 2024 election. Who's to say they're wrong?
Moving along, let's meet our next horrible subverter of democracy, Mark “Lumpy”Penn. Your first understandable reaction might be: who tf is Mark Penn?
He's been finagling around politics for decades now, supposedly in the service of responsible “centrism.” He once found a willing audience in Bill and Hillary Clinton (when they were not taking advice from whore-toe-polisher Dick Morris), but was kicked to the curb by Hillary Clinton in 2007 when she realized what everyone else had known for years: he was full of s***.
The New York Times story gives a handy capsule of his corrupt loathsomeness:
Mark Penn, the pollster who has advised Bill and Hillary Clinton since 1996, stepped down under pressure on Sunday as the chief political strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign after his private business arrangements again clashed with her campaign positions.
Mr. Penn, who was widely disliked by Mrs. Clinton’s fiercest loyalists and had bitterly feuded with many of them, sealed his fate last week by meeting with officials from Colombia, which hired him to help secure passage of a bilateral trade treaty with the United States that Mrs. Clinton, a senator from New York, opposes.
Mr. Penn met with the Colombians in his role as chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, a global public relations firm. He has refused to sever his ties to the company, which also represented Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, and through a subsidiary represented Blackwater Worldwide, the military contractor blamed for numerous civilian deaths in Iraq.
He sounds nice.
Since that time he has nursed his grudge against the Clintons and by extension all Democrats, all the while pocketing a pantload of cash from his flackery. His latest act of vengeance is a dirty tricks operation disingenuously called No Labels, which he runs with his no doubt charming wife Nancy Jacobson and buckets of dark money from Republican plutocrats eager to undermine Biden's re-election prospects:
Jim Messina, the Montana-bred Obama reelection campaign manager prone to colorful language, suggested that Jacobson and Penn were straining for power and attention. They “are sort of no longer relevant within the party,” he told me, “so now they’re going outside the party looking for relevancy.” Messina also trashed the group as essentially fronting for Trump. “Besides giving directly to Donald Trump’s campaign, the best thing you can do to elect Donald Trump is to support No Labels,” Messina said.
Update – maybe his wife Nancy Jacobson isn't that nice after all:
Ex-aides said there is incredibly high turnover. And according to one former staffer, No Labels executives would ask employees to write positive reviews on the job-posting and workplace review site Glassdoor to counteract the more numerous bad ones. Asked if that was the case, Jacobson simply shrugged and casually said, “yeah.”
Oh. And sounds like she married the right guy:
But politics these days is merely Penn’s hobby. Even while he worked for Hillary, he was an executive inside a PR firm owned by WPP. He left in 2012 after it became clear that Sorrell, then CEO, would never let him run the giant holding company. (Sorrell remarked pointedly that Penn’s successor was “collegial with good people skills.”)
Copy that.
But the issue is not Lumpy's repellent personality. It's that he is one of the chief conspirators in a shadowy scheme to mobilize dirty Republican money behind running a third party candidate to swing the election to Donald Trump (or if the Twice-Indicted Sex Offender strokes out before Election Day or whatever equally abhorrent stooge the Republicans nominate):
And Penn’s wife, Nancy Jacobson, runs No Labels, the purportedly hard-core moderate outside group currently working to prop up a serious third-party “unity ticket” in 2024. That ticket could spell doom for Joe Biden and Democrats hoping to keep control of the White House—and keep Donald Trump out of it.
Our final entry in today's news quiz is a much quieter but in his own way even more dangerous and subversive figure: Chief Justice John Roberts.
What's he doing lumped in with Bobby and Lumpy? Is it just that he presides benignly over the most corrupt and illegitimate Supreme Court since, oh, maybe, the one that tried to chuck out the New Deal or the one that said Black persons weren't – persons? Sure, that's part of it, not to mention his own persistent grotesque conflict of interest: his spouse trousers (or I'm sure like the good Catholic girl she is, skirts) millions in placement fees from the same monstrous Washington law firms that appear every f***king term before her husband.
We're sure she doesn't kiss and tell her hubby which of those firms have been naughty or nice, because they're all lining up to get in good with Mrs. Chief Justice. Wouldn't you? Anyway, thanks to the laughably lax Supreme Court ethics rules, us plebeians will never know.
That's not the real problem though. The real problem is that Roberts has spent virtually his entire legal career, first as a right-wing bureaucrat, then as a Bush campaign mouthpiece, and now in his current gig working feverishly and successfully to undermine American democracy:
More specifically, according to the Brennan Center:
Ten years ago, the Supreme Court eviscerated a central component of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. That decision removed the requirement for jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal approval for new voting policies — a process called “preclearance.” Without this guardrail, voters lost a bulwark against discriminatory voting policies, and states previously subject to preclearance were free to implement discriminatory restrictions on voting access without advance checks. Many states did exactly that.
Along with a prior decision narrowly interpreting constitutional protections for voting rights, Shelby County also sent a message to the nation that the federal courts would no longer play their historic role as a robust protector of voting rights. In the years since, the Court has repeatedly confirmed this, signaling to states that they could pass restrictive voting laws without fear of legal consequence.
And who wielded the knife? John Roberts, that's who:
Politico's takedown explained that Roberts's ludicrous Shelby County opinion voided in effect the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act on the grounds that lots had changed since Congress first specified which parts of the country had to preclear changes in voting laws with the Justice Department. (As the Brennan Center's data, supra, established, maybe they haven't changed that much). He also cried about the cruelty endured by states and counties who had to preclear their changes while watching tearfully places like Massachusetts that were not subject to preclearance.
As a result Southern states, ruled by white supremacist Republicans, have passed many laws intended to limit the ability of Democrats to vote without oversight from the Justice Department. And it's worked great – for white Republicans.
And now the moment America has been waiting for. The question was: What do three of the biggest white male threats to democracy have in common?
The answer is – and we must have absolute silence [The Spy is often greeted by absolute silence – Ed. McMahon]: all three scourges entered Harvard College on the same bright September day in 1972.
Which gives rise to (but does not beg, thank you Dartmouth) the question: is Harvard to blame?
 |
| Alas we only have photos of John Roberts' freshman year |
We think in large part yes. We will attest that Bobby and Lumpy entered Harvard as egregious a**holes. We don't know about John Roberts, alone in his room with his bong.
But Harvard certainly played a major role in their shameful deportment since. There they learned to speak authoritatively on subjects about which they knew nothing. There they learned to ignore the views of others, especially non-white non-male non-Harvard graduates. There they learned that they were entitled to impose their ridiculous views on others, no matter what harm resulted.
And there they learned, even though Professor Henry Kissinger had already left his office in Littauer for a career as a war criminal and Nixon prayer partner, that they knew best and if others didn't understand that, it was a sign of their third-rate intellect. And therefore, according to the great Prof. Kissinger, they better duck.
We humbly suggest that Harvard take a break from selling off its schools and paving Allston to ensure that this doesn't happen again. Perhaps to their Core Curriculum they should add courses like “Just Because You're Here, You Don't Know What You're Talking About,” “Shut Up and Listen,” or even “Try Not To F**k Everything Up For The Rest of Us.”
The chances of this happening are in our estimate slim to none, because courses like this might get young minds to think the same things about their professors, whom they observe at a respectful distance from the 82d row of Sanders Theater.
And if there's one lesson known to every faculty member of the Finagling Plutocrat (formerly Harvard) School of Arts & Sciences, it's that humility is for losers.
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