Pearl River      President-elect Trump wants to shake the tree as hard as he can until the leaves fall into piles that he likes.  I get that.  No president, good or bad, comes into office determined to do exactly what the ones before him did.  In his usual tactical repertoire, he goes for the bleachers and hopes he can get on base with a single.  He’s the Bill Veeck of politics.  Just like Veeck would upend baseball sending midgets to bat and all manner of pranks, Donald Trump, the showman, sends the clowns in to run the government and its agencies.  Or, at least so it seems.  For all his talk about the deep state and the legions employed in the federal bureaucracy, he is depending on the deep state to make sure everything works, no matter what he says and who he pushes up front.

He names someone who criticizes the spy force to be the chief spy.  He goes with a TV guy to run the Defense Department.  People who hate the environment and this stuff about climate change get to run the environmental protection agency.  You get the idea, right?  Disrupt at the top and hope that it trickles down, but even as you spit at them, count on the federal workforce to maintain core competency so that the whole federal government doesn’t fall off the wheels.

Nonetheless, appointing an anti-vaxxer to run the mammoth health operation that maintains the public health of the nation, seems a bridge too far, since it’s not just a matter of health, but one of life and death, as we know too well from the pandemic.  We’re talking about Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Recently, it came out that he and his organization’s lawyers had tried to question the efficacy of polio vaccines to see if they could stop them.  Former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, a polio survivor, was adamant that anyone facilitating the return of the polio epidemic to the US could forget about getting approved to run a federal agency.  Even the obstreperous Kennedy got the message that was going to be a nonstarter.

Now it comes out that six-months into the recent pandemic, he and his team were trying to stop the rollout of the vaccines.  Estimates are that 140,000 Americans had already been saved.  Who knows how many would have died with his help.

This isn’t a hard call.  This guy is to whack to work.  He cannot be approved to run the US health agency.  Period.