US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is no stranger to scandal, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph: he once dumped a bear carcass in New York’s Central Park and (separately) sawed the head off a dead whale. But the erotic poetry he wrote for political journalist Olivia Nuzzi during their “digital affair” at the height of the 2024 presidential election must be his “most heinous” crime yet. “Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest,” it reads. “I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you.” This execrable verse was published – in an “Oscar-worthy” act of revenge – by another reporter, Ryan Lizza, who was engaged to Nuzzi at the time. Many of RFK Jr’s other efforts were, he says, “too explicit to print”.

Everything about this story is “darkly hysterical”, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. But because this is America, and “literally nothing on this earth takes itself as seriously as American journalism”, it is being chronicled with maximum portentousness. Nuzzi is documenting her relationship with a character she calls “the politician” in a memoir titled – and I am not making this up – American Canto. Lizza began his account with an extraordinarily extended and heavy-handed metaphor about the bamboo in their courtyard. Worst of all is Vanity Fair, Nuzzi’s new employer, which says it is now reconsidering her appointment. “For heaven’s sake, buck up and stop being so absolutely wet.” Anything involving a presidential candidate writing “felching poetry” (look it up, if you dare) should obviously be written as comedy, not some boring ethics crisis. “Stop being so American and serious about it all.”

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