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He's the perfect pick. Grown in a lab just for this moment:
White, handsome, accomplished astronaut, unknown politics, and he defuses the Trump assassination attempt narrative.
It's the third time I've seen something about Kelly on social media in the last day. Which is weird, since I didn't know he existed until today.
I know I'm almost certainly wrong here, but for some reason I feel like attacking an astronaut whose wife got shot by a deranged right wing crank especially after Trump just got shot at could really backfire for him. He got away with going after McCain because even Average American kind of knows subconsciously that the Vietnam War was a horrible debacle and that kissing the ass of an admiral's pilot failson that repeatedly crashed and got shot down on a mission he volunteered for to bomb a civilian lightbulb factory is bullshit.
It's the same reason Trump was able to weather the hit in the 2016 primaries of having the entire media turn on him when crossed the red line of admitting the Iraq War was a disaster that never should have happened and gave Jeb a wedgie and said W was a fuckup that let 9/11 happen, even flag waving Republican primary voters implicitly had metabolized that Iraq and the GWoT were bullshit make-work projects for the MiC that left millions dead/displaced/maimed/traumatized.
I feel like Average American isn't nearly as soured against astronauts as they are against the military, and Mark Kelly is so perfectly bland that I feel like there isn't really a handhold for Trump to dig in against him with some nickname or scandal narrative. Did Trump ever even bother going after Tim Kaine in 2016? Literally the only thing I remember about that guy is he was an anti-abortion Democrat and he plays the harmonica.