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mousmeFor my own amusement (and maybe yours), here's the text of two posts that I got from the Facebook page Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 2024. It's the author's take on both days of the hearings, and is funny in that laugh-so-you-don't-cry way.
Day 1
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. walked into his Senate confirmation hearing like a man stepping onto an ice rink wearing banana peels for shoes. He had one job: convince the world that he was not a bug-eyed conspiracy theorist who once hoarded a whale head and left a bear carcass in Central Park. Instead, he walked out as the leading cause of migraines among Democratic senators.
This was supposed to be his moment of redemption, his big I’m-not-actually-insane speech. Instead, it turned into a political demolition derby featuring protesters screaming that he was a liar and a killer, Bernie Sanders interrogating him about baby clothes, Elizabeth Warren asking if he planned to run HHS like a side hustle, and a surreal moment where Kennedy had to confirm that he probably said Lyme disease was a military bioweapon. By the end of the day, Capitol Police had forcibly removed more people from the chamber than a dive bar on St. Patrick’s Day.
Kennedy barely got through his opening statement before a woman exploded from the gallery like a jack-in-the-box filled with rage and science degrees.
“YOU LIE!” she screamed, holding up a sign that read VACCINES SAVE LIVES before being swiftly tackled and dragged out by Capitol Police.
Kennedy blinked rapidly, which is how you know he was hearing the voice of the worm that used to live in his brain whispering, Abort mission, Bobby. Abort mission.
A brief moment of peace settled over the room, and then it happened again.
“YOU'RE KILLING PEOPLE!” another protester howled, launching into a full-body rage spiral before security carried her out, legs kicking, like a screaming suitcase with opinions.
Kennedy took a deep breath and tried to regain his footing, but Senator Ron Wyden had been waiting for this moment like a prosecutor with a personal vendetta.
“Are you lying to us, Mr. Kennedy?” Wyden snapped, staring daggers at him.
Kennedy forced a nervous smile, but it came out looking like he’d just been told he had to fight a horse for a parking spot.
“That claim has been repeatedly debunked,” he said, attempting to sound reasonable despite an entire room full of people who were watching YouTube compilations of him saying the exact opposite.
Wyden wasn’t buying it.
“You signed a petition to restrict access to the COVID vaccine. Did you or did you not?”
Kennedy mumbled something about the petition being “misrepresented” as the air in the room thickened with sweat, bad decisions, and organic supplements.
Wyden was gearing up for a finishing blow when another protester detonated like a landmine.
“YOU’RE A FRAUD!” she shrieked as security dragged her away in a full-body lock.
Even the cops looked exhausted now.
Then came Bernie Sanders, a man who has not been in the mood for nonsense since 1972.
“Are you supportive of these baby onesies?” he demanded.
The room froze.
Kennedy’s brain crashed like a Windows 98 PC.
“Excuse me?”
Sanders lifted a printed-out photo of a baby bodysuit covered in anti-vaccine slogans.
“These are being sold by the Children’s Health Defense, the organization you founded.”
Kennedy looked like he had just accidentally eaten a ghost pepper and was trying to play it cool.
“I—I don’t have oversight over that organization anymore,” he mumbled.
Sanders cracked his knuckles like a man ready to fistfight a CEO and leaned in.
“Are you supportive of these onesies?”
Kennedy started sweating through his suit.
Laughter rippled through the room. A Republican senator actually covered his face.
Kennedy, now looking desperate for a fire alarm to pull, tried to pivot to his real passion: banning corn syrup.
Sanders wasn’t having it.
Then Elizabeth Warren took the mic, radiating pure prosecutorial energy.
“Will you commit to not taking money from pharmaceutical companies while serving as Secretary of Health?” she asked, in the tone of a woman who already knew the answer but was going to enjoy watching him squirm.
Kennedy grinned like a dog that just chewed up your furniture and is hoping you’ll laugh it off.
“I don’t think they’d want to give me money,” he chuckled.
Warren did not chuckle.
“Will you commit to not profiting from lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies while serving as HHS Secretary?”
Kennedy froze.
The color drained from his face.
“You’re asking me not to sue drug companies?” he said, voice rising.
“No, I’m not going to agree to that.”
Warren’s eyes gleamed like a hawk spotting a wounded rabbit.
“So you’ll be suing the same companies you’re supposed to regulate?”
Kennedy looked like he wanted to melt into his chair.
Then came Michael Bennet, a man who had been waiting patiently to drop a grenade into Kennedy’s lap.
"Did you say that Lyme disease was a militarily engineered bioweapon?” Bennet asked, deadpan.
Kennedy hesitated.
“I probably said that.”
The audience gasped.
Bennet cocked an eyebrow.
“Did you say that pesticides turn children transgender?”
Kennedy turned bone white.
“I don’t recall saying that.”
Bennet’s lip twitched.
“But you do recall saying Lyme disease was a bioweapon?”
Kennedy looked like he had been hit by a tranquilizer dart.
Even the Republican senators were staring at their desks, avoiding eye contact.
The hearing finally adjourned, but Kennedy is not in the clear yet
.
His next grilling is scheduled for tomorrow, and there’s no telling how much worse it can get.
His opponents smell blood. His supporters are already crafting conspiracy theories about the deep state.
And if the vote ends in a deadlock, Vice President JD Vance will cast the deciding vote.
Yes, JD Vance—the political equivalent of a wet cardboard box—will determine if a man once partially controlled by a brain parasite will run America’s health system.
The nation waits in suspense. Pass the whiskey.
Day 2
The Kennedy name used to mean something. Once upon a time, it stood for glamour, power, and a tragic, almost Shakespearean nobility. Now, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it means “that guy from your weird uncle’s Facebook page” who won’t shut up about Big Pharma and Wi-Fi signals frying our brains.
And this week, in front of a packed Senate hearing room, we all bore witness to his public self-immolation—a three-hour, slow-motion car crash, narrated by a man who clearly never thought he’d actually be put in charge of anything real.
The Senate hearings for RFK Jr.’s nomination as Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services were supposed to be a routine bloodbath—Democrats would scream about vaccines, Republicans would pretend not to hear them, and at the end, Trump’s handpicked lunatic would be rubber-stamped into power. But something went terribly wrong for Team MAGA. Kennedy, the anointed High Priest of Anti-Vaxx Insanity, showed up and made even Republicans deeply, viscerally uncomfortable—a nearly impossible task in 2025.
Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican and actual doctor, kicked things off with a monologue about a patient who needed a liver transplant because she didn’t get a hepatitis B vaccine. Cassidy all but pointed at Kennedy and said, “This is your fault, you lunatic”—a rare moment of sanity in a GOP that normally embraces conspiracy theories like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.
Cassidy begged Kennedy to just say, “Vaccines don’t cause autism.” Kennedy, the self-appointed Galileo of Vaccine Skepticism, couldn’t do it. Instead, he squirmed like a middle schooler caught plagiarizing his book report, saying, “If the data is there, I’ll say that.” As if mountains of studies, years of research, and the combined knowledge of modern medicine weren’t enough to satisfy a guy who probably gets his medical news from Joe Rogan clips.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders—whose blood pressure at this point must be measurable only by seismographs—tried to make Kennedy acknowledge that COVID vaccines saved lives. Kennedy, in what may go down as one of the most brain-melting exchanges in Senate history, refused to answer. “I don’t know,” he said. “We don’t have a good surveillance system.”
This is the moment when Bernie’s soul left his body. The man who once spent hours explaining Scandinavian tax policy on live TV visibly aged 10 years in real time.
If Kennedy had just stuck to his usual script—mumbling about "toxins" in food and the CIA beaming radio signals into our fillings—maybe, just maybe, he could have escaped this hearing with a shred of credibility. But no.
Enter Senator Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, who—like a merciless elementary school teacher—decided to pop quiz Kennedy on Medicare and Medicaid.
It was a slaughter.
She asked him basic, first-grade questions about the massive health programs he would oversee, and he whiffed every single one. He mixed up Medicare Part A and Part C. He didn’t seem to know that Medicaid is funded by both the states and the federal government. At one point, he said something so profoundly incorrect that even he had to stop and admit he "misstated something.”
It was like watching a man audition to be a pilot by repeatedly walking into the propeller.
By the time Hassan was done with him, Kennedy looked like a man who had been mugged in broad daylight but wasn’t quite sure how it happened.
Just when you thought Kennedy couldn’t find a deeper hole to crawl into, Senator Angela Alsobrooks, a Black Democrat from Maryland, hit him with the “What the hell did you mean when you said Black people need a different vaccine schedule than white people?” question.
Yes, this is a thing he actually said. On record. With his whole chest.
Kennedy, suddenly realizing that maybe saying weird race science stuff on podcasts isn’t a great strategy for getting confirmed, tried to babble his way out of it. He cited “studies” that apparently suggest Black people need fewer antigens than white people.
Alsobrooks, who had clearly reached the "I’m not mad, just disappointed" stage of dealing with dumbassery, cut him off: “That is so dangerous.” She then made it abundantly clear that she would not be voting for this walking medical malpractice lawsuit.
In a rare moment of bipartisan unity, literally everyone in the room agreed that Kennedy had just said something profoundly stupid.
At this point, you have to ask: Why in God’s name did Trump nominate this guy?
The answer, of course, is that Trump thrives on chaos. He doesn’t care about qualifications—he cares about spectacle. And RFK Jr. is a spectacle, a mutant fusion of prestige family name, internet crank, and Diet Trump populism.
But there’s a problem. Kennedy isn’t actually good at this. Trump’s other nominees—Kash Patel for the FBI, Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence—know how to fight in the mud. Kennedy, on the other hand, just stood there and let himself get publicly executed.
The Republican Senate is willing to rubber-stamp almost anyone Trump throws at them—but even they have limits. If a few GOP senators defect, Kennedy is toast.
Cassidy, Murkowski, Collins—they don’t seem thrilled about letting the world’s most famous anti-vaxxer take control of America’s healthcare system. If even three of them vote against him, this nomination is dead in the water.
What we witnessed over these two days wasn’t just a failed confirmation hearing. It was a public unraveling—the moment RFK Jr. realized that being the internet’s favorite conspiracy theorist does not qualify you to run a $1.6 trillion health agency.
Even in a world where Donald Trump is the President (again), where reality and satire are indistinguishable, and where people willingly vote for Marjorie Taylor Greene, this might have been a bridge too far.
Kennedy is not going to win over Democrats—he spent too many years going on Infowars for that. His only shot is clinging to Republicans, and even they are looking at him like he’s a bad stock investment.
If I were a betting man, I’d say Kennedy’s nomination won’t make it past next week. If it does, we are officially living in a simulation run by the dumbest possible version of reality.
Either way, one thing is clear: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just had the worst job interview of his life.
Day 1
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. walked into his Senate confirmation hearing like a man stepping onto an ice rink wearing banana peels for shoes. He had one job: convince the world that he was not a bug-eyed conspiracy theorist who once hoarded a whale head and left a bear carcass in Central Park. Instead, he walked out as the leading cause of migraines among Democratic senators.
This was supposed to be his moment of redemption, his big I’m-not-actually-insane speech. Instead, it turned into a political demolition derby featuring protesters screaming that he was a liar and a killer, Bernie Sanders interrogating him about baby clothes, Elizabeth Warren asking if he planned to run HHS like a side hustle, and a surreal moment where Kennedy had to confirm that he probably said Lyme disease was a military bioweapon. By the end of the day, Capitol Police had forcibly removed more people from the chamber than a dive bar on St. Patrick’s Day.
Kennedy barely got through his opening statement before a woman exploded from the gallery like a jack-in-the-box filled with rage and science degrees.
“YOU LIE!” she screamed, holding up a sign that read VACCINES SAVE LIVES before being swiftly tackled and dragged out by Capitol Police.
Kennedy blinked rapidly, which is how you know he was hearing the voice of the worm that used to live in his brain whispering, Abort mission, Bobby. Abort mission.
A brief moment of peace settled over the room, and then it happened again.
“YOU'RE KILLING PEOPLE!” another protester howled, launching into a full-body rage spiral before security carried her out, legs kicking, like a screaming suitcase with opinions.
Kennedy took a deep breath and tried to regain his footing, but Senator Ron Wyden had been waiting for this moment like a prosecutor with a personal vendetta.
“Are you lying to us, Mr. Kennedy?” Wyden snapped, staring daggers at him.
Kennedy forced a nervous smile, but it came out looking like he’d just been told he had to fight a horse for a parking spot.
“That claim has been repeatedly debunked,” he said, attempting to sound reasonable despite an entire room full of people who were watching YouTube compilations of him saying the exact opposite.
Wyden wasn’t buying it.
“You signed a petition to restrict access to the COVID vaccine. Did you or did you not?”
Kennedy mumbled something about the petition being “misrepresented” as the air in the room thickened with sweat, bad decisions, and organic supplements.
Wyden was gearing up for a finishing blow when another protester detonated like a landmine.
“YOU’RE A FRAUD!” she shrieked as security dragged her away in a full-body lock.
Even the cops looked exhausted now.
Then came Bernie Sanders, a man who has not been in the mood for nonsense since 1972.
“Are you supportive of these baby onesies?” he demanded.
The room froze.
Kennedy’s brain crashed like a Windows 98 PC.
“Excuse me?”
Sanders lifted a printed-out photo of a baby bodysuit covered in anti-vaccine slogans.
“These are being sold by the Children’s Health Defense, the organization you founded.”
Kennedy looked like he had just accidentally eaten a ghost pepper and was trying to play it cool.
“I—I don’t have oversight over that organization anymore,” he mumbled.
Sanders cracked his knuckles like a man ready to fistfight a CEO and leaned in.
“Are you supportive of these onesies?”
Kennedy started sweating through his suit.
Laughter rippled through the room. A Republican senator actually covered his face.
Kennedy, now looking desperate for a fire alarm to pull, tried to pivot to his real passion: banning corn syrup.
Sanders wasn’t having it.
Then Elizabeth Warren took the mic, radiating pure prosecutorial energy.
“Will you commit to not taking money from pharmaceutical companies while serving as Secretary of Health?” she asked, in the tone of a woman who already knew the answer but was going to enjoy watching him squirm.
Kennedy grinned like a dog that just chewed up your furniture and is hoping you’ll laugh it off.
“I don’t think they’d want to give me money,” he chuckled.
Warren did not chuckle.
“Will you commit to not profiting from lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies while serving as HHS Secretary?”
Kennedy froze.
The color drained from his face.
“You’re asking me not to sue drug companies?” he said, voice rising.
“No, I’m not going to agree to that.”
Warren’s eyes gleamed like a hawk spotting a wounded rabbit.
“So you’ll be suing the same companies you’re supposed to regulate?”
Kennedy looked like he wanted to melt into his chair.
Then came Michael Bennet, a man who had been waiting patiently to drop a grenade into Kennedy’s lap.
"Did you say that Lyme disease was a militarily engineered bioweapon?” Bennet asked, deadpan.
Kennedy hesitated.
“I probably said that.”
The audience gasped.
Bennet cocked an eyebrow.
“Did you say that pesticides turn children transgender?”
Kennedy turned bone white.
“I don’t recall saying that.”
Bennet’s lip twitched.
“But you do recall saying Lyme disease was a bioweapon?”
Kennedy looked like he had been hit by a tranquilizer dart.
Even the Republican senators were staring at their desks, avoiding eye contact.
The hearing finally adjourned, but Kennedy is not in the clear yet
.
His next grilling is scheduled for tomorrow, and there’s no telling how much worse it can get.
His opponents smell blood. His supporters are already crafting conspiracy theories about the deep state.
And if the vote ends in a deadlock, Vice President JD Vance will cast the deciding vote.
Yes, JD Vance—the political equivalent of a wet cardboard box—will determine if a man once partially controlled by a brain parasite will run America’s health system.
The nation waits in suspense. Pass the whiskey.
Day 2
The Kennedy name used to mean something. Once upon a time, it stood for glamour, power, and a tragic, almost Shakespearean nobility. Now, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it means “that guy from your weird uncle’s Facebook page” who won’t shut up about Big Pharma and Wi-Fi signals frying our brains.
And this week, in front of a packed Senate hearing room, we all bore witness to his public self-immolation—a three-hour, slow-motion car crash, narrated by a man who clearly never thought he’d actually be put in charge of anything real.
The Senate hearings for RFK Jr.’s nomination as Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services were supposed to be a routine bloodbath—Democrats would scream about vaccines, Republicans would pretend not to hear them, and at the end, Trump’s handpicked lunatic would be rubber-stamped into power. But something went terribly wrong for Team MAGA. Kennedy, the anointed High Priest of Anti-Vaxx Insanity, showed up and made even Republicans deeply, viscerally uncomfortable—a nearly impossible task in 2025.
Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican and actual doctor, kicked things off with a monologue about a patient who needed a liver transplant because she didn’t get a hepatitis B vaccine. Cassidy all but pointed at Kennedy and said, “This is your fault, you lunatic”—a rare moment of sanity in a GOP that normally embraces conspiracy theories like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.
Cassidy begged Kennedy to just say, “Vaccines don’t cause autism.” Kennedy, the self-appointed Galileo of Vaccine Skepticism, couldn’t do it. Instead, he squirmed like a middle schooler caught plagiarizing his book report, saying, “If the data is there, I’ll say that.” As if mountains of studies, years of research, and the combined knowledge of modern medicine weren’t enough to satisfy a guy who probably gets his medical news from Joe Rogan clips.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders—whose blood pressure at this point must be measurable only by seismographs—tried to make Kennedy acknowledge that COVID vaccines saved lives. Kennedy, in what may go down as one of the most brain-melting exchanges in Senate history, refused to answer. “I don’t know,” he said. “We don’t have a good surveillance system.”
This is the moment when Bernie’s soul left his body. The man who once spent hours explaining Scandinavian tax policy on live TV visibly aged 10 years in real time.
If Kennedy had just stuck to his usual script—mumbling about "toxins" in food and the CIA beaming radio signals into our fillings—maybe, just maybe, he could have escaped this hearing with a shred of credibility. But no.
Enter Senator Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, who—like a merciless elementary school teacher—decided to pop quiz Kennedy on Medicare and Medicaid.
It was a slaughter.
She asked him basic, first-grade questions about the massive health programs he would oversee, and he whiffed every single one. He mixed up Medicare Part A and Part C. He didn’t seem to know that Medicaid is funded by both the states and the federal government. At one point, he said something so profoundly incorrect that even he had to stop and admit he "misstated something.”
It was like watching a man audition to be a pilot by repeatedly walking into the propeller.
By the time Hassan was done with him, Kennedy looked like a man who had been mugged in broad daylight but wasn’t quite sure how it happened.
Just when you thought Kennedy couldn’t find a deeper hole to crawl into, Senator Angela Alsobrooks, a Black Democrat from Maryland, hit him with the “What the hell did you mean when you said Black people need a different vaccine schedule than white people?” question.
Yes, this is a thing he actually said. On record. With his whole chest.
Kennedy, suddenly realizing that maybe saying weird race science stuff on podcasts isn’t a great strategy for getting confirmed, tried to babble his way out of it. He cited “studies” that apparently suggest Black people need fewer antigens than white people.
Alsobrooks, who had clearly reached the "I’m not mad, just disappointed" stage of dealing with dumbassery, cut him off: “That is so dangerous.” She then made it abundantly clear that she would not be voting for this walking medical malpractice lawsuit.
In a rare moment of bipartisan unity, literally everyone in the room agreed that Kennedy had just said something profoundly stupid.
At this point, you have to ask: Why in God’s name did Trump nominate this guy?
The answer, of course, is that Trump thrives on chaos. He doesn’t care about qualifications—he cares about spectacle. And RFK Jr. is a spectacle, a mutant fusion of prestige family name, internet crank, and Diet Trump populism.
But there’s a problem. Kennedy isn’t actually good at this. Trump’s other nominees—Kash Patel for the FBI, Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence—know how to fight in the mud. Kennedy, on the other hand, just stood there and let himself get publicly executed.
The Republican Senate is willing to rubber-stamp almost anyone Trump throws at them—but even they have limits. If a few GOP senators defect, Kennedy is toast.
Cassidy, Murkowski, Collins—they don’t seem thrilled about letting the world’s most famous anti-vaxxer take control of America’s healthcare system. If even three of them vote against him, this nomination is dead in the water.
What we witnessed over these two days wasn’t just a failed confirmation hearing. It was a public unraveling—the moment RFK Jr. realized that being the internet’s favorite conspiracy theorist does not qualify you to run a $1.6 trillion health agency.
Even in a world where Donald Trump is the President (again), where reality and satire are indistinguishable, and where people willingly vote for Marjorie Taylor Greene, this might have been a bridge too far.
Kennedy is not going to win over Democrats—he spent too many years going on Infowars for that. His only shot is clinging to Republicans, and even they are looking at him like he’s a bad stock investment.
If I were a betting man, I’d say Kennedy’s nomination won’t make it past next week. If it does, we are officially living in a simulation run by the dumbest possible version of reality.
Either way, one thing is clear: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. just had the worst job interview of his life.
