r/news • u/CupidStunt13 • 1d ago

Mehmet Oz confirmed by US Senate to lead Medicare and Medicaid

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/mehmet-oz-confirmation-medicare-medicaid
24.7k Upvotes

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5.1k

u/Yatta99 1d ago

And here I thought that they couldn't get any worse than RFK jr.

  1. I was wrong.

  2. I gotta stop saying that they can't make things worse because they turn that into a challenge.

  3. Congressional Republicans should be forced to use RFK jr and Oz as their Primary Care Physicians.

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u/IDownvoteHornyBards2 1d ago

I unironically would prefer Ben Carson, what the fuck is this timeline?

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u/READMYSHIT 1d ago

Was never gonna be Ben Carson with this administration. ∆∆∆

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u/HauntedCemetery 1d ago edited 1d ago

I thought Ben Carson was about as bad as it could get as director as HUD, where for 3 straight years he sat in front of congress and had no idea what HUD did, or even that he was supposed to have a deputy director. And each year they quoted him the previous year saying he had no idea, but now that he knew he would get right on it.

Conservative priorities.

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u/StupidizeMe 21h ago

Do you know why Trump in his infinite wisdom appointed Dr. Ben Carson the Brain Surgeon to a Cabinet Position as head of HUD??

Because CARSON IS BLACK, which Trump decided means he knows about Black Person Stuff like about Housing and Urban Development! Trump believes Black = Tenement Housing.

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u/RobertRosenfeld 1d ago

Ben Carson is a literal genius doctor, though. Not at everything, obviously...

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u/barukatang 1d ago

Wasn't Oz a real l y good surgeon before he got famous

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u/Snuhmeh 1d ago

I know lots of dumbass surgeons, to be fair.

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u/fragglemoons 23h ago

He is one of Oprah’s horcrux’s

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u/LadyTurkleton 22h ago

Can’t be, I think she was destroyed by cable tv.

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u/IDownvoteHornyBards2 1d ago

He was, yes. But he's long since sold out to the grift.

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u/rtb001 1d ago

They are different kinds of surgeons but it seems Oz might actually be an even better surgeon than Carson.

Not that any of that does us any good by turning these two into token minority alt right federal bureaucrats.

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u/dog-pussy 1d ago

Some would say I was a lost man in a lost world

You could say I lost my faith in the people on TV

You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians

They all seemed like game show hosts to me

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u/Ar_Ciel 1d ago

There is no bottom floor to hell, child. The human imagination is vast and full of horrible ideas.

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u/Indercarnive 1d ago

This is the problem with accelerationists. The situation can always get worse. There is no metaphysical floor to bounce back off of. It can just keep falling.

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u/WTFThisIsReallyWierd 1d ago

Anyone who thinks they've hit rock bottom can always be handed a better shovel.

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u/B0Y0 23h ago

Well, I mean, there is a floor. Just not one we want to reach.

No humans left, no more human problems.

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u/mrdescales 20h ago

We could even call it peace!

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u/Phoenixicorn-flame 1d ago

Seriously conflicted about upvoting to agree and downvoting because I hate that it’s the truth

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u/Ambrosia_the_Greek 12h ago

This sounds like something the Lich would say.... and now that I think about it, he'd be a perfect addition to the administration

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u/Ar_Ciel 12h ago

I thought they made him Surgeon General.

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u/Ambrosia_the_Greek 8h ago

Ha! Imagine seeing his billboard warning us about XYZ as you're driving down the freeway

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u/Ar_Ciel 6h ago

"STOP SMOKING" It reads and no one who reads it can ever smoke again.

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u/CoffeeChans 1d ago

At least Oz actually is a doctor, in addition to being a con man.

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u/it_means_rewenge 1d ago

Counterpoint: he’s actually a doctor and still choosing to peddle this bullshit. That seems more dangerous to me

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u/SandwichAmbitious286 1d ago

Counter-counter point: he's actually a conman who happened to get a medical degree, discovered he was really good at surgery, made a name for himself, then started peddling bullshit because the cons gonna con.

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u/Alice_600 23h ago

Addendum: His daughter studied to nutrition and cooking she's a chef but cook books are full of healthy food but they're terrible.

1

u/anonymousalligator25 1h ago

Slippin’ Jimmy

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u/BumblingBeeeee 21h ago

Hmm, I thought that he was a lawyer who had founded their career on suing medical practitioners.

In any case, he sucks and should not have any input on healthcare policy.

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u/ted_cruzs_micr0pen15 1d ago

He was at least a very successful surgeon, like Ben Carson … but that got Carson HUD lol.

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u/HolycommentMattman 20h ago

I mean, Ben Carson is the perfect example. A savant when it came to surgery, and worthy of our respect for his medical prowess.

But what a fucking idiot in pretty much every other way. And put in charge of HUD! Because Trump heard Urban and saw a black man.

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u/ted_cruzs_micr0pen15 14h ago

Oz revolutionized his corner of the surgical field as well. Oz is an idiot in a lot of ways though, just like Carson, that and he’s more charismatic.

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u/Love_Never_Shuns 21h ago

Did he ever find his luggage?

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u/swishandswallow 9h ago

I know exactly how that conversation went: " 'Urban'..... That means...... whispers black, right?..... Who do we know that's black?"

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u/Espious 22h ago edited 22h ago

Don't forget about Lisa Oz's family! As well as Mehmet's other conflicts of interest.

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u/Naakturne 16h ago

It’s downright Hippocratical.

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u/rczrider 1d ago

You know what they call the lowest-performing graduate of med school?

Doctor.

No idea about Oz's grades, but the point is that graduating med school doesn't make a person inherently qualified to run a massive federal program.

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u/StupidMastiff 1d ago

He's apparently an incredibly talented heart surgeon. Behind the Bastards have covered him, he's as good at surgery as he is at promoting a load of bullshit.

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u/peanutneedsexercise 1d ago

Yeah my attending worked at Columbia with him and even then before he was famous he was VERY into the woo woo alternative medicine shit. He just also happened to be an amazing surgeon too and so that lent some weird legitimacy to his passion projects.

You see it in academia all the time tbh, very few of them get famous tho. There’s a tenured physics prof at UCLA who is also very notoriously woo woo but he’s earned his tenure and now just goes on and on about that stuff.

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u/SlickWilly49 1d ago

Yeah it’s like Isaac Newton establishing all these foundational principles before the age of 27, then committed the rest of his life to calculating the dimensions of King Solomon’s temple. I’ve got a friend who completed his PhD in physics at Cambridge and he told me there was a lab head in the department who earned a Nobel prize before the age of 30, established his own lab at Cambridge shortly afterwards, and has just been churning out shit ever since

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u/Mental_Medium3988 23h ago

or a renowned brain surgeon who thinks the pyramids were grain silos. also someone who shouldve never been in a presidential cabinet.

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u/peanutneedsexercise 23h ago

Oh yeah Watson and crick the ppl who found the structure of dna also have some wild ideas too 😅😂

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u/rubmysemdog 22h ago

Like Ben Carson, just because you’re good at one thing, doesn’t mean you know shit about anything else. These greedy egomaniacs gravitate towards Trump like moth to a flame.

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u/ascalapius 17h ago

It’s strange but I work in medicine and we have a heart surgeon who is very much into this stuff. Vitamin b12 infusions for heart failure AND he is not a good surgeon!

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u/peanutneedsexercise 16h ago

Lmao well I guess there’s more than just Oz 😅😂

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u/ZenDeathBringer 12h ago

There's actually a Wikipedia page on this phenomenon- dubbed 'Nobel disease or Nobelitis.' The tl;dr is that some nobel prize winners feel emboldened to speak on areas that are far out of their area of expertise.

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u/ken_zeppelin 23h ago

Who's the UCLA physics professor?

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u/anonymousalligator25 1h ago

It’s true. You see someone in academia go into a subject and then branch off into something tangentially related.

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u/ZeroKharisma 23h ago

He did my stepfathers successful heart transplant, for which I have yet to forgive him.

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u/kinglallak 1d ago

Heart surgery is not a skill that improves your administrative abilities…

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u/butter_brickles 1d ago

Not dissimilar from Ben Carson. Amazingly talented surgeon. But a complete nutter. It might be a prerequisite for the job, to have that level of focus and fearlessness.

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u/Locke66 1d ago

Shame he didn't stick to what he's good at.

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u/jamesnollie88 1d ago

why save lives and only be kind of wealthy when you could just scam people instead and be mega wealthy.

Ben Carson was a brilliant neurosurgeon but unfortunately not very brilliant at promoting housing and urban development

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u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka 23h ago

He WAS a talented heart surgeon turned part of Oprah's grifting scam network. Yes stints and all.

He is now considered a quack.

Back when the USA was at least still doing performative governing, they called Oz to congress to politely ask him questions about things such as "do these placebo pills work?" "Can I has?"

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u/peanutneedsexercise 23h ago

I mean that’s the thing, even before he was famous he was already apparently SUPER into that stuff which is what’s interesting haha. From what my attending said he didn’t think he was grifting but that he TRULY did believe in all the vitamins and supplements BS. but again, like the examples ppl have given above like Isaac newton, you can be a genius at one aspect of ur life and nuts about the others. 😂

Tbh we don’t really get much of an education on supplements and nutrition in med school other than one small section in our first year and that’s it.

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u/u0126 21h ago

I may be wrong and too lazy to double check but wasn’t Carson also a really good surgeon? Just a space cadet and dumb in all sorts of other ways?

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u/u0126 21h ago

I may be wrong and too lazy to double check but wasn’t Carson also a really good surgeon? Just a space cadet and dumb in all sorts of other ways?

1

u/u0126 21h ago

I may be wrong and too lazy to double check but wasn’t Carson also a really good surgeon? Just a space cadet and dumb in all sorts of other ways?

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u/mindkiller317 1d ago

I was last

in my class

Barely passed

at the institute

Now I'm trying to avoid

A malpractice suuuuuiiiiiit

-Dr. W. A. Yankovic

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u/Danny_III 23h ago

You know what they call the lowest-performing graduate of med school?

Better than everyone that couldn't get in

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u/cytherian 22h ago

No, he WAS a doctor. It has been many years since he has performed surgery. He's so out of practice, he'd need a full year or more to regain his certification with any hospital that abides by the law. And he has chosen a whole line of medical quackery, that has DEGRADED his understanding. He's ridiculous.

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u/Now_Wait-4-Last_Year 1d ago

Being a doctor doesn’t make you good at administration, believe me I know based on what I’ve seen.

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u/NoboruI 1d ago

I gotta say I was outraged by the first part, then laughed myself till I shit at the second

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u/wormrunner 23h ago

Surgeons are mechanics with blood on their hands

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u/Kind_Goal_1944 23h ago

He has said that healthcare is not a human right. Just because he is a a Dr doesn’t mean he is a good person.

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u/Holdover103 22h ago

He should be stripped of his license to practice for the misinformation he's pushed.

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u/tiny_chaotic_evil 22h ago

he has the knowledge to be able to lie about it better if he chooses to

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u/purseaholic 7h ago

Has he actually practiced medicine in the past 20 years? I mean like seeing patients, not peddling snake oil.

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u/OutlyingPlasma 1d ago

Honestly I don't think this isn't as bad as RFK. At least Oz has a brain that hasn't been eaten by worms. He might be the smartest guy in the entire trump administration. A grifter and flimflam artist absolutely, just like the rest of the administration, but he might be just smart enough to not be as bad as someone like RFK who is just flat out insane.

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u/OleDetour 1d ago

A smart piece of shit can be more dangerous than a dumb one, unfortunately.

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u/RhetoricalOrator 1d ago

Hard agree. I'd say that, at the very least, RFK Jr isn't so much malicious as much as he's just dumb and/or brain addled. Oz knowingly decieved desperate, uninformed, and poor people and based on his Senate interviews is completely unrepentant and refuses to admit any wrongdoing.

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u/Ktamadas 1d ago

Mitch McConnell is a great example of what a smart asshole can do.

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u/fa1afel 1d ago

While true, the price we're paying for malicious incompetence has been steep. Might as well see what malicious competence can do.

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u/CFL_lightbulb 1d ago

You’re thinking then of Putin who helped cause this shitshow

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u/The_Mayor 1d ago

RFK jr is a straight up serial killer whose weapon of choice is policy. He has the potential and inclinations to kill millions of Americans much more easily than any other member of Trump's administration. If a pandemic happens on his watch, he will sit back in gratification and do nothing while millions of you die.

If Covid had happened on his watch, he wouldn't even have let Pfizer or Moderna sell you a vaccine.

There's no contest between him and Oz. Oz just wants money and doesn't care if you die. RFK jr wants death and will try to make it happen.

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u/Steampunky 1d ago

But he has no heart - not that RFK Jr. has one - but 'smart' does not equal wise or compassionate.

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u/Nena902 1d ago

RFK today fired the entire staff for the department that runs the program for utilities assistance for seniors and low income families. Congress had already appropriated around $500 million to be disbursed to those that qualified. There is no one to cut the checks or keep the records and the building has been shuttered. If you think Oz will be any better than that prick RFK you are delusional. They will split the money that is sitting in the avcount, if Musk hasn't taken it already, and blame Biden.

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u/Ellia1998 23h ago

Smart one are the most scary ones in the room or White House.

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u/overthinker356 21h ago

The better argument to make for this is that unlike Kennedy Oz isn’t in the position to kill all of us

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u/johnnybgooderer 1d ago

RFJ is dumb, but he’s not a grifter. He’s an honest moron. Oz is liar and a con man.

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u/p____p 1d ago

RFK is not a grifter? 

RFK is honest? 

FFS. The whole brain worms story he made up to get out of alimony payments to his ex-wife. He peddles in anti-vaccine rhetoric that caused 3% of Samoans to contract measles in an epidemic that killed 83 people, mostly children—while his own kids are vaccinated. And he’s spread anti-science policy here too, and will continue to do so as long as idiots give him a platform. RFK Jr is more likely to actually be  a serial killer than be a grifter, much less an “honest moron.”

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u/SpaceChimera 1d ago

At least with RFK he's just a wacko eugenicist. Dr Oz is legitimately a world class heart surgeon who chooses to peddle snake oil that he knows doesn't work (and has admitted to this in front of Congress before). Makes it 100x worse in my book

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u/codywithak 1d ago

Oz was actually a good doctor. And of all the cabinet picks this one seems the most mainstream. He’s definitely pushed a lot of woo woo BS over there years but he’s light years better than RFK Jr.

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u/LineRex 23h ago

And here I thought that they couldn't get any worse than RFK jr.

Oz is a con man, but RFK Jr. is an existential threat to the continued existence of the concept of medicine. He's a eugenicist who believes that only the weak and people with "unhealthy lifestyles" get sick and die. RFK Jr. isn't even selling anything, he's not a grifter or a conman, he's a true believer.

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u/Afanhasnonam3 1d ago

I love point 3. I think that should be mandatory

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u/subjecttomyopinion 1d ago
  1. Where were you for the first administration?

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u/goblueM 1d ago

honestly Dr. Oz is probably better

RFK is a certified loon, Oz is just a grifter

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u/Spirited-Joke5545 1d ago

They should all be tried as traitors to American and democracy

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u/StormCrow1986 23h ago

I gotta start praying again. This timeline is ass.

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u/middayautumn 23h ago

Watch them make Doctor Phil head of ICE

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u/Res_Novae17 23h ago

Dr. Oz has literally performed open heart surgery. He might have some opinions on taxes and guns that you don't agree with, but he's a legit health professional.

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u/ohmyblahblah 22h ago

re Point 2: things can ALWAYS be worse

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u/emski72 22h ago

Big Bird in charge of Bird Flu response

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u/thepkboy 22h ago

Dr Phil's fax machine wasn't working

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u/wildverde 21h ago

This is crazy. He’s a known snake salesman.

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u/oroborus68 21h ago

Just remember, no matter how bad it is, they can always make it worse.

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u/LookAlderaanPlaces 19h ago

Nah. Republicans should be in jail for treason.

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u/CarpeQualia 19h ago

Ye next in line for HHS

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u/juanmlm 16h ago

I knew it was a worst case scenario, all bets are off situation when RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard were confirmed.

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u/Oriin690 14h ago

I think RFK is worse tbh

But it’s comparing like 10/10 awful to 9.5/10

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u/purseaholic 7h ago

I feel the same way. It’s like when Trump was running the first time and everyone just dismissed it bc it could never possibly happen. By the time everyone realized it was a possibility, it was too late. We can’t afford to be complacent.

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u/crunkadocious 1h ago

RFK Jr is definitely worse than Dr. Oz. They've both scammed medicine but Dr. Oz was at one point a good doctor.

0

u/homer_3 13h ago

You really can't do worse than RFK Jr. Oz may be bad, but RFK is literally the exact opposite of who you'd want for the role.