“Meh, you could do worse.” - official campaign slogan of the federal Disappointment Party.
So, it looks like RFK Jr., in attempting to step out of a quagmire involving the fast-acting, all-purpose smear of “antisemitism,” has stepped into another by rebranding himself as a staunch Zionist, making dubious statements about Palestine and promising “as president my support of Israel will be unconditional.”
“Unconditional”?
This disappointing item reminded me of a moment years back, when someone asked if I ever thought about running for office. My response was a hollow laugh. For one thing, I’m chronically allergic not just to office politics, but to paperwork - I’d probably go into anaphylactic shock handling my first memo.
But if I did run for office as a member of Parliament, it would be as an independent under the banner of a new party. And with weasel words, broken promises and shattered dreams the stock in trade of the political world, I’d take the honest approach by promising disappointment right up front.
My pitch as leader of the federal “Disappointment Party” would sound something like this (mercifully edited with the reader’s shrunken attention in mind):
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Thank you, thank you. My fellow Canadians, my name is Geoff Olson. As leader of the Disappointment Party I am running for a seat in the riding of Horsefeathers-Beelzebub, and I am asking for your support as the future prime minister of Canada.
I may make promises, but I will not be held to them. I am telling you this up front, to get a jump on your future disappointment. Politics is defined as the art of compromise. Stuff happens, circumstances change, people change. I will change too. So will other members of my party. Embrace the uncertainty.
I am right for the job. I have disappointed a wide range of people over time, from employers to friends to family to total strangers. Not consistently and not completely, but certainly enough to raise doubts about my intentions, my memory, and my character.
So why should you give me your vote? As I said, I will not raise your hopes only to dash them into the ground. I won’t raise them at all! You won’t be disillusioned with ME, because I won’t illusion YOU.
Let me explain. When I heard Obama give his stirring speech in Chicago in 2008, I had high hopes. Yet in no time flat, the newly elected president rebranded himself as Obomber, droning Afghan wedding parties into bloody confetti and expanding the Bush Cheney wars from two to seven. Goodbye, American optimism!
And when Justin Trudeau defeated Stephen Harper in the 2015 Canadian election, I was deleriously happy, believing the no prime minister could ever be worse than the robotic Conservative leader. Ha!
Given these and other experiences of political disenfranchisement - NDP premier David Eby, Green leader Elizabeth May, congressthing Octavio Occasional Cortex, among others - I figured I could succeed in these terms as well. Disappointment appears to be no bar to political success, and disappointment is in my wheelhouse.
Yes, this is the age of diminished expectations, and Geoff Olson is its bendable action figure! Hence the Disappointment Party’s campaign motto: “Meh. You could do worse.”
Not that there won’t be surprises. I promise nothing less than bipolar levels of unpredictability until I’m voted out, wheeled into the Senate, or targeted from a sniper’s nest.
Most leaders are pushed about by the hidden hand of power. But if I become prime minister, I will be like a computer mouse with the ball removed - frustratingly maddening to manage. Because I don’t intend to just disappoint the electorate. I intend to disappoint everyone.
That’s right. When corporate lobbyists from Big Pharma, Big Ag and Big Whatever descend like like a flock of flying monkeys onto Ottawa, you can be sure they will find me as rubbery on my commitments as you do. I may be either compliant or uncooperative. I may say yes one day, and no the next. It’s impossible to say. Bringing my attention deficit disorder to full fruition, I will drift in the wind in a manner impossible to predict!
As the poet G.K. Chesteron once observed, “angels fly because they take themselves lightly.” It’s harder to hit a moving target (Dealy Plaza notwithstanding).
I could go on about the excesses of the so-called free market, which is now dominated by a handful of monopolies. I could insist that liberalism is now an effete, gutless masquerade. And I could add there is no principled opposition to corporatism, which is the union of corporate and government power, threatening not just small businesses but individual freedoms. Instead I will just say this: jobs, jobs, jobs! And more jobs! I promise a lot of them, folks! Good ones! Great jobs for good Canadians! I swear on a stack of pancakes!
Speaking of which, I promise to flip flapjacks, kiss babies, listen sagely to seniors, and display a giant, shit-eating grin before rented crowds. I will pledge to be all things to all people all the time. Some voters will insist Geoff Olson cannot win with such a traditional political platform, but I have a ready-made, one-word response: Trump. If, against all expectations and expert opinion, a casino magnate and reality TV star with hair the colour of Cheetos managed to corral half the American electorate and rebrand his nation like a hogtied calf, why can’t a recovering journalist with a tiny Substack following turn things inside out in Soviet Canuckistan?
Still, there will be cynics who ask, ‘why would I choose The Disappointment Party? Why should I vote for a nobody like Olson?’ My response is from a piece of graffitti I once saw:
“Nobody will keep election promises. Nobody will listen to your concerns. Nobody will help the poor and unemployed. Nobody cares. Nobody tells the truth. Vote for Nobody!”
Vote for a nobody! Vote for me!
That sounds a little like Zaphod Beeblebrox's speech, the President of the universe, before he went and stole the spaceship with the total improbability drive, The Heart of Gold, in Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Politics with a "Heart of Gold" no less.
It's not just Israel.
"Kennedy wrote that I had defended mercury in vaccines because the rotavirus vaccine on which I was a co-inventor was “laced with thimerosal.” But the rotavirus vaccine, which was licensed one year later, never contained a preservative. I called a senior editor at Rolling Stone who later retracted the article, as did Salon."
Kennedy claims--“You need to talk to Paul Offit. Paul Offit made a $186 million deal with Merck. Odd to me that government regulators said that you should talk to someone in the industry.”
Offit--"First, I have never worked for a pharmaceutical company. At the time of the interview, our rotavirus vaccine wasn’t a licensed product."
https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/my-conversation-with-robert-f-kennedy
Naomi Klein:
Because RFK Jr is so eloquent about pollution, many assume he would support policies that would tame the raging climate crisis. While that may have been true in the past, the facts have radically changed. In recent interviews, he claims climate science is too complex and abstract to explain and that, “I can’t independently verify that.”
His about-face has earned him friends among the most prominent and dangerous climate-change deniers, including the Republican-aide-turned-disinformation-dealer Marc Morano, who says Kennedy is “undergoing a genuine transformation over his views on the climate agenda.”
Klein comments on RFK jr's take on autism:
"Acknowledging all of this – the change in diagnostic criteria, the disability rights victories, challenges to medical racism, aging parents – would give us a much fuller understanding of rising autism rates. But that is not nearly as dramatic or juicy as blaming vaccines and screaming about government cover ups."
On foreign policy:
But that raises the question: what does the US owe to the people living in the parts of the world its policies have ravaged? Very little, according to Kennedy. He has taken to warning about the US’s “open border,” and he told Musk he is looking for ways to “seal the border permanently.” He has also cited Israel – with its network of walls and fences imprisoning Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza – as a positive example of a country successfully controlling its borders.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/14/ignoring-robert-f-kennedy-jr-not-an-option