Kristi Noem: No one will top my bizarre animal killing stories.
RFK Jr.: Hold my bear.
— Josh Gondelman (@joshgondelman) August 4, 2024
Actually, you don’t get weirder than Roseanne giving you side-eye…
You don't get weirder than RFK Jr. talking to Roseanne about dumping a bear in Central Park in an attempt to get ahead of a story about it. We have his version, I'll be interested to hear the real story. This man is a maniac.
pic.twitter.com/vPDE50yfqB— TheRealThelmaJohnson (@TheRealThelmaJ1) August 4, 2024
In the patois of our people: Better to have kept his tongue between his teeth. The New Yorker profile is not an Isaac Chotiner special; it was probably intended as a beat-sweetener, but it reads more like a lawyer’s dutiful plea for his client’s early parole (The tragic chronic illness of substance abuse… traumatic childhood… bad companions… we’re all very pleased with how well Bobby’s incorporated his hard-won lessons. ) Here’s the entirety of the New Yorker’s take on the bear story, four-fifths of the way through a very long, deeply dispiriting narrative:
… One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. In a picture from that day, Kennedy is putting his fingers inside the bear’s bloody mouth, a comical grimace across his face. (When I asked Kennedy about the incident, he said, “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”)
After the outing, Kennedy, who was then sixty and recently married to Hines, got an idea. He drove to Manhattan and, as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist. The next day, the bear was discovered by two women walking their dogs, setting off an investigation by the N.Y.P.D. “This is a highly unusual situation,” a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy told the Times. “It’s awful.” In a follow-up piece for the Times, which was coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, one of J.F.K.’s granddaughters, a retired Bronx homicide commander commented, “People are crazy.”…
My people — our (Irish-American) people — have a tradition of composing proud sagas about our reckless, feckless, substance-abusing Warriors (aka chaos muppets). I was told that our drunks run in packs because there’s got to be at least one guy in the bunch who can piece together a narrative after the event. My old man was a (mostly functional) alcoholic, so this is how I understand RFK’s bear tale, from RFK’s own telling:
Bobby and a bunch of his guys spent the afternoon out in the hunting field, an expedition where a certain amount of celebratory drinking is practically mandatory. Eventually, everybody piled into RFK’s van, which was driven by RFK himself, because of course it would be very wrong to hand over the keys to a(nother) drunk, officer!
At some point on the way to Westchester, a bear cub — probably already dead — was encountered. It seemed like a good idea to stuff the carcass in the back of the van, because Bobby could skin it later, and maybe the meat would be edible, at least for the falcons or something. *Totally* legal, because a retroactive game license for roadkill bear is available in NY state. (Remember, kids: Bobby had not been drinking.)
Monday Evening Open Thread: RFK Jr, Pursued By A Bear (Story)Post + Comments (134)
