Louisiana’s U.S. Senator John Kennedy has written a national best-seller, “How to Test Negative for Stupid And Why Washington Never Will.” The preposterous conceit that drives the book is that everybody, or almost everybody, in the nation’s capital is stupid, with the exception of Senator Kennedy.
He is in fact an intelligent and clever man with a gift for colorful put-downs that have gotten him attention. He was president of his class at Vanderbilt, finished near the top at the University of Virginia Law School, and earned high marks when he studied jurisprudence at Oxford University in England.
But the sophisticated exams he took must not have been true/false tests. As he spins his autobiographical yarns, he reveals an astonishing inability to tell truth from fiction.
Through much of the book he offers an entertaining view of his life story and colorful put-downs of Congress in general and Democrats in particular. “How many times has the Senate solved a problem? Don’t know. It has never happened.” Or “you can lead a politician to Congress but you can’t make him think.” Senate seniority puts in power people “whose first pet was a dinosaur.” President Biden “could not finish a sentence without taking a nap.” Democrats are “childless cat people” and “prissy.” On the other hand, President Trump’s only problem is that he tweets too much.
Kennedy has to admit he began his career as a devoted Democrat. Louisiana voters elected him state treasurer three times on the Democratic ticket. In fact, I knew him in law school and the last time I saw him was at a John Kerry for president rally in 2004.
But he couldn’t get elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat so he switched parties with the usual “I didn’t change, the party changed” excuse. He won in 2016, just in time to befriend President Donald J. Trump. Kennedy has taken his Senate job seriously. He says he was responsible for the FCC’s sale of frequencies that netted billions. He has embarrassed some unqualified judicial nominees of both parties.
Unfortunately he has also stepped off into the fictional world of President Trump. He is proud of his own personal “candor” but has a complete inability to be “candid” or even truthful where the president is concerned.
Wrong answer number one is his repeated reference to the 2016 Trump campaign’s Russian involvement as a “hoax.” Really? The Republican-led Senate Intelligence committee said in 2020 said that the Russians were involved in the campaign. It is undisputed that Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort had gotten money from the Russians, not Trump, Manafort gave the Russians political intelligence, and they conducted an internet campaign to discredit Hilary Clinton. Trump publicly asked for Russian help, he got Russian help, and even today Trump seems to be ready to carry out Manafort’s assigned mission to get Ukraine for Putin.
Wrong answer number two is Kennedy’s claim that the indictment of President Trump for conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election results was an act of partisan retribution. To the contrary, it was a necessary prosecution of a previously unimaginable crime. President Trump lost more than 60 court challenges to those results, yet still falsely claimed that the election had been “stolen” and incited a mob to attack Congress and delay the vote. And then Trump ratified the attack when he pardoned the rioters who had injured 160 Capitol policemen.
Those policemen were, of course, protecting Kennedy and other legislators. Kennedy says he “backs the blue,” but apparently that does not include the ones who protected him on January 6, 2021.
Wrong answer number three comes in Kennedy’s elaborate attempt to show how he, through careful questioning of Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, made sure during the nomination hearings that they would not use their prosecutorial power for the purpose of political retribution. How has that turned out?
Already the administration has tried to prosecute former FBI director James Comey, fired Comey’s daughter who worked for the Justice Department, tried to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James, said it would prosecute Senator Mark Kelly for saying soldiers had a duty to follow the law, and has said, before retreating, that it would prosecute Minnesota’s governor and the mayor of Minneapolis because they criticized ICE. If Senator Kennedy has a plan to prosecute Bondi and Patel for perjury, he has kept it well hidden.
Kennedy at one point opines that stirring things up is good because “only dead fish go with the flow.” That raises the question as to whether he himself is a dead fish, at least when it comes to avoiding the truth in a spineless willingness to flow along with President Trump’s budding autocracy. By his own definition, that is stupid.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
