Rush Limbaugh: Against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
El Rushbo agrees: the quack Kennedy ought to be laughed out of the room.
I have no idea what to expect from the confirmation hearings for the polygamous Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who last January defended his family’s wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr.) because the Republican enthusiasm is a deranged departure from the conservative ideology they once held. Suddenly, the people most allergic to Whole Foods are happy handing the keys to the kingdom to an environmental lawyer and radio host from the failed progressive Air America network (alongside the left-wing all-star lineup of Rachel Maddow, Marc Maron, Sam Seder, Chuck D., Cenk Uygur, and Jerry Springer).
I diligently scraped together a small little pile of excerpts from Mr. Kennedy’s radio appearances, if anybody wishes to do some last-minute muckraking. A personal favorite of mine is this Russia Today segment, where Mr. Kennedy ironically accuses Republicans of “oftentimes put[ting] people very hostile to the mission of the agency [in charge of the agency].”
The Doctor of Democracy himself, Rush Limbaugh, leaned over his golden microphone at the Excellence In Broadcasting network in 2007 and declared that “RFK Jr. is a glittering jewel of colossal ignorance,” that he was a “socialist” who wanted to “encourage the defeat of the United States militarily,” that “Bobby Kennedy doesn’t like the fact he can’t control all these people and make them see the world the way he wants them to see it because they see through his hoax”
In 2010, El Rushbo said of Mr. Kennedy: “I question — where are RFK Jr.’s credentials? His number one credential is his last name, and number two, his credential is he’s got an approved cause, and that is, world peace, world whatever, save the world with environmentalism or what have you. And my point is, he doesn’t need qualifications… Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got into the environmentalism business because he was sentenced to it. ‘In 1984, Kennedy joined the Riverkeeper organization to satisfy the 1,500 hours community service to which he was sentenced.’ I don’t know what the offense was. So he became an environmentalist as community service, 1,500 hours. ‘After his 1,500 hours of community service were complete, the group hired Kennedy as its chief attorney.’ So it would be safe to say that Robert Kennedy Jr. was sentenced to environmentalism and then took it up as his life’s calling. That’s his qualification.”
In 2011, America’s Lie Detector slammed Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine conspiracies as a debunked hoax: “Robert Kennedy Jr. was a major champion of the claim that vaccines cause autism. In fact, some people say that Robert Kennedy Jr. almost single-handedly managed to stoke fears that vaccines were causing an epidemic of autism. This is what leftists do. They create crises, hysteria, and panic. Why? Because they want to go sue the companies involved and expand government and get rich themselves off the whole process. Now it’s all been debunked.”
I rarely agreed with Mr. Limbaugh, but unlike many of my peers, I never felt it necessary to threaten to urinate on his grave or whatever other vulgarities they reserved for the Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient’s tragic death from lung cancer in 2021. He may have been an odious presence on drivetime radio and caused harms to the psyches of his Dittohead legion, but he also was a real humanitarian. I would have thought that the Republican Party, who has frequently sought to honor the debt they owe him for his tireless advocacy of beliefs they are ashamed to articulate would respect him enough not to elevate someone he despised.
A strange turn in 2025: that I, a rigid, partisan Democrat, have more care for the legacy of Mr. Limbaugh than his party.
And indeed, what does Mr. Kennedy have to offer the Republican Party that is so compelling? We know he thinks President Donald Trump’s supporters are “idiots, Nazis, and bootlickers,” hates oil, hates fracking (even as of 2024), hates corporations, and loves abortion. We know that he first ran to be the Democratic president, compared Mr. Trump to Hitler, then offered to join whichever or Mr. Trump’s or Kamala Harris’s campaign promised him the most before ending his third-party bid.
Currently, the front page of the radical environmentalist activist group Mr. Kennedy founded, the Waterkeeper Alliance, accuses Mr. Trump of taking “a reckless step backwards, benefitting polluting industries and at the expense of American families and communities.” (They are correct.) It seems the WKA has little love left for the man they were once described as a “cult of,” possibly due to alleged corruption and financial mismanagement.
Caroline Kennedy spoke damningly on the eve of Mr. Kennedy’s nomination hearing, accusing him of being a predator, who “encouraged [his siblings and cousins] down the path of substance abuse suffered addiction, illness and death while Bobby has gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life,” “prey[ing] on the desperation of parents of sick children — vaccinating his own children while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs,” and gleefully putting animals in blenders. (All this on top of decapitating a beached whale.)
What can I say? Mr. Limbaugh always called ‘em as he saw ‘em, and he saw Mr. Kennedy’s lying, grifting ass from miles away. Republicans should stop and very seriously think before they nominate such man. This country has many adults, who are vaccinated and healthy enough, who might nonetheless trust any Yes votes are an endorsement of the policies and proposals of the Health and Human Services Secretary, and it will not be those adults who suffer—it will be their children. Do Republicans really want to please Mr. Trump so much that they will even give power to such an unworthy man against even their own principles? If so, they ought to resign to make room for some better senators.