Dinner with Bobby and Cheryl

The missus and I have long been followers of the Kennedy clan and of its most famous current specimen, Bobby Kennedy Jr. In recent months we were glad to see him move into a picturesque row house in our beloved Georgetown (surrounded though our enclave may be by that widely feared sh*thole, the District of Columbia). So imagine our gratification when we received a dinner invite from Mr. RFK, Jr. himself and his lovely wife Cheryl.

 (Yeah, you guessed right—this is all completely made up. But please, continue reading.)

We had taken an Uber LUX --when in Rome, right? – to their address based on reports that it boasts but one parking spot (when you’re running a major government department, who has time for foresight?) and we alighted on the sidewalk with a gracious helping hand from our chatty driver, Ramon. 

 As it happens, a quartet of men in camouflage fatigues and balaclavas popped out of a unmarked van, tasered Ramon, leg-whipped him off his feet, and forced him facedown onto the curb.

 My wife foolishly tried to impede this activity and even pushed one of Mr. Trump’s patriots in the back; but as one beefy officer reached for the baton, Bobby himself appeared at the top of the stairs with a casual, “Hey, hey, fellas, we’re all good here.”  Ramon’s jacket—had one pocket torn half off and his mobile phone lay beside him, screen turned to shiny dust. Then Bobby said, and I believe he was joking, “By the power vested in me by our president, I pardon you without further inquiry.”  Ramon looked desperately—is `grateful’ the word? —as he used his shirttail to address a few drops of blood oozing from the cement burn along his right jawline. “Go in peace, fellow," Secretary Kennedy said, then added, “You’re not going to be vaxxing your kids, am I right?”

 He and the…agents, we’ll call them, for they wore no identifying insignia, laughed heartily together, as these patriots showed their appreciation of power judiciously wielded.

“Hey, let Ramon be on his way to urgent care,” said Bobby, “I’ll run you twoback to your place later--” he re he shared an encompassing grin— “if a few mammal parts in the back won’t bother you.”  We of course agreed. 

 At the door we were greeted, not discourteously, by a pair of FBI agents in the familiar windbreakers. and we made airplane arms to be meticulously frisked. As they went through my wife’s purse she offered—she’s a bit of a card--“No Epstein buddy list in there, buddy!”

Bobby was dressed informally in classic-fit jeans and a tight MAHA-logo tee-shirt that showed his biceps to good effect and made for a subtle contrast to his visage, with its ruddy burnt sienna complexion that spoke of either good health or an imminent brain-splattering eruption. (Should that occur, I silently prayed, please let there be no associated, suddenly airborne ,brain worms.)

 And as we stepped into the foyer, there she was, the queen of the castle, smiling graciously and impeccably coiffed, looking every bit as natural she does in her the jacket photo for her (upcoming-in-November) “Unscripted” memoir.  Though she recently offered the Wall Street Journal a rather thin gruel as to what it contains, a fair presumption would in some way address the pesty media focus on her husband’s mid-2024 sexting scandal involving magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi. That career-dis-enhancing incident followed earlier reports by the New York Post that asserted Bobby had kept a tally of his numerous affairs, consummated and otherwise, in a kind of “Dear Diary” memorialization of his “lust demons.” (Which might have made a good sports-team moniker—better than Commanders, anyhow.) 

Rumors and whispered receipts, and the demise of his first marriage indicate that has required no expert honey-trapper to entice the man of the house. As he stood there-more or less the final exemplar of the onetime bootlegging legacy, Cheryl alongside smiling indulgently, I envisioned my wife in all sisterhood tossing out a jape like, “No conniving blondes here tonight, we hope?”  but perhaps it was for the best that she did not. 

 One knows that rule the ethnically streamlined MAGA cohort will never install is “No more blondes in this house.”   Indeed,  possibly deeper in the elegant rooms already burbling with  imperial schemes over cocktails s may have been the near-platinum’s: frowning press secretary Karoline Leavitt, feckless Attorney General Pam Bondi, and, in the person of bleach blonde bad built butch body chairwoman of the Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee, a snarling stateswoman friends—that excludes  you, Laura Loomer!—as MTG. 

 “Oh, thank God we didn’t bring Fifi,” my wife whispered in reference to our sometimes reactive  Shih Tzu, whom Bobby had encouraged us to bring. For my eyes followed the missus’s gaze into the drawing room, , where she had just spotted none other than Ms. Kristi Noem, wearing her usual expression of  Cleopatra hauteur as she ran an admiring hand along the fluted barrels of a vintage over-under shotgun hung over the mantelpiece. 

R.I.P., Cricket. At 14 months you never developed proper manners ; then mom's head shot came. 

Noem had briefly tried an electronic collar, the failure of which may explain current federal disappearing procedures. I.e., most of the people the Secretary of Homeland Security has caused to be captured (often, `extra-judiciously’,) were more cuffed, bent double, and frog-marched to an unknown fate--in multiple cases, a El Salvadorean hellhole. (You could almost lip-read the confined horde, locked in cells a few feet from her backside, enthusing over her sneering visage: “She's 52? She’s had some fabulous work.”) 

Even more vital to the nation than MAGA, in the view of our hosts, would be their own urgings to “Make America Healthy Again.” (Though it is only a sidebar to the broader MAGA playbook as used to empower, through geometrically advancing martial law, the destruction of democratic principles and of the Constitution itself.)  Cheryl recently opined that she and President Trump have “a nice friendship,” which is lovely for two television stars to achieve. Such found bonhomie might be compared to her “Curb You Enthusiasm’s charcter take, when sho averred after the latest outrage, “My job is loving you, Larry.”

As it turns out, the so-desired beefy feature article in the Wall Street Journal Magazine what last week turned out to be a not overly churlish rolf’ing with promotional benefits. Though the writer’s lunchpail did heap up with a tasting menu of Bad Stuff About Bobby:  “First came  [RFK Jr.’s] extreme rhetoric, like when he suggested that Holocaust victim Anne Frank had more freedom than Americans facing vaccine mandates. Then came his presidential bid and bizarre stories he shared about a dead worm in his brain and a bear cub he dumped in New York’s Central Park. Then last summer, he endorsed Trump, leading prominent members of his storied Democratic family to publicly decry him. He ended the year fending off allegations of a sexting relationship with a much younger campaign reporter.”

Cheryl propounds a certain bafflement over people who find Trump, and by association her husband and herself, to be such a threat to the world order: “At first, you’re thinking, Wow. Why are they so angry or disappointed?... it’s really rather strange, actually.”

 Yes, girlfriend, imagine that, people watching Bobby growl (referring to his banked belligerence and not his unfortunate, voice-robbing malady) through his Congressional appointment hearing with Cheryl and fam arrayed behind in support for the session. The Republicans enabled Bobby's campaign against the cure for a global threat, and now a murderous nut case has sprayed the CDC with automatic fire.

 Larry David’s former wife Laurie is of course the model for Cheryl’s role in “Curb,” and real Larry himself introduced the once-liberal-ish Bobby to work wife Cheryl. Laurie, however, found the tableau triggering and saw: “CherylHines [sic] in her best and most watched performance yet,” David wrote on Threads, “as the ‘dutiful, adoring wife’ setting women back decades.” 

 Cheryl’s knack, if that’s the word, is to turn a question into an observation that can make for a handy non-answer: “I don’t really have a relationship with [Laurie], , so that was also even more surprising that she had so many feelings about me sitting behind my husband, supporting him.”  

 As much as Trumpism has left the country sliding towards a miserable state of mis-government-by-autocracy, and new villains appear weekly, Cheryl cannot be expecting the warmest of welcomes for her book (and herself) as national hopes for prosperity, peace, justice and health (oh yes, Bobby) slide out of. view

 “I do talk about experiences, people, press, rumors,” she told the Journal of her (?) writings, and at one stage inscrutably set up a fresh pile of Jenga blocks re her marriage: “One would deduce that we love each other and are still married and whatever we’ve been through is behind us.”

 The stately home where we stood, the missus observed, could be the proper focus of an Architectural Digest article, or, were measles cases not getting a dangerous refresher and MAHA policy were not about to risk the kind of vaccine prevention and treatment saved us from a deadly pandemic, maybe even a warm Vanity Fair piece. No. Nope.

At the moment, standing under an (intended to be-) heroic and unironic portrait of the man of the house with one of his hunting hawks, we were trying to put out of our minds his relation Caroline Kennedy’s account of Bobby grinding up vermin in a blender to feed his hawk.  In fact, having quaffed couple doses of champagne, we were anticipating the call to table. 

For the visitor from the Journal, Bobby’s cameo offered copy, though hardly not a nomination for husband of the year: “Kennedy says he recently turned down the offer of a baby owl. “Cheryl said no,” he says. “She doesn’t like dead chicks in our freezer.”

Soon came stirrings in the dining room, with much to and fro of servers, all presumably not by what good MAGA folk might call “illegals”. We slugged our second flute of champagne even as we were called to table, only too curious as to which course might include road-killed bear and pitchers of raw milk; it was left to my wife to add a plan: “Let’s just get through this and hope we don’t end up on a guest list as the lead story on Page Six.”