Donald Trump and Joe Biden have been in the news lately. Especially Donald Trump. For various reasons.
But what about Bobby?
I was curious to see, posted last Friday in the Daily Post, news about an announcement from the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign that they had turned in more than 30,000 signatures on Thursday, more than double the 12,000 required to get on the November ballot in Colorado.
I imagine it will take the Secretary of State’s office a few days to verify 30,000 signatures. But it seems very likely that I will now have a choice of three Presidential candidates over the age of 70.
Like my mother always told me, “Three’s the charm.” I never understood what she meant by that, until now.
Mr. Kennedy’s campaign team also submitted double the number of signatures needed in Georgia, and in New York. And triple the number needed in New Mexico.
If you want to believe the information coming from the Kennedy campaign — and that’s definitely a choice you can make — RFK Jr. is the first third-party candidate in U.S. history who beats both the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate in head-to-head polling.
Not really something to brag about. But running for office requires a considerable amount of bragging. Here in America, the candidate who can brag the best is typically the one we vote for. We don’t care if the bragging corresponds in any way to reality; we just like to hear a candidate blow his own horn, as loudly and as often as possible.
So Bobby — I like to call him Bobby — has his work cut out for him, in terms of bragging. Considering the competition.
Like most men who run for President, Bobby is a lawyer. Not a lawyer like Michael Cohen, who pays off porn stars with fraudulent checks, but the kind of lawyer who works for an environmental group like ‘RiverKeeper’ and gets named “Hero of the Planet” by TIME magazine.
I first started seeing online references to Bobby when the COVID-19 “vaccine” was being developed. At that point, he had been an anti-vaccine activist for many years, making the argument — as were many others — that the draconian childhood vaccination regime required for admittance to public schools was driving a dramatic increase in the rate of autism in the U.S.
He doesn’t have a lot of nice things to say about the pharmaceutical industry, and he naturally became one of the more outspoken critics of universal COVID vaccination.
I doubt vaccine opposition, by itself, could have gotten him elected, because most Americans get vaccinated whenever they’re told to.
But he has other qualifications. For example, in 2013, he and his son Conor were arrested in front of the White House for protesting the Keystone Pipeline’s construction through native lands and protected wilderness.
We Americans like Presidential candidates who have been arrested. Even better if they’ve been found guilty.
As of December 2022, the lawsuits filed against the Monsanto Corporation, to which Bobby has devoted much of the past decade, had yielded $11 billion for farmers, migrant workers, day laborers, and families exposed to the dangerous pesticide RoundUp.
Other prime qualifications: He wrote a book titled The Real Anthony Fauci. And, he has four dogs.
But the main reason I might vote for Bobby is his running mate, Nicole Shanahan. Nicki — I like to call her Nicki — was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin; they separated in 2021 and divorced in 2023. (So she could run for Vice President?) She speaks Chinese fluently. And she has two dogs.
She reportedly has a net worth of over $1 billion, primarily as a result of her marriage to Sergey.
Like Bobby, she has been an anti-vaccine activist.
If these two get elected — Bobby and Nicki — and we have another pandemic, we won’t have to be vaccinated with an experimental drug, like what happened with COVID.
And there will be dogs in the White House.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.