Dana Bash Delivers. RFK Jr. Distresses. | Winners & Losers in Today’s Green Room

In a special that aired on Monday night, Chris Christie told CNN’s Dana Bash that he doesn’t regret voting for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, even as the former governor acknowledged Trump’s role in inciting the Capitol riot.

Christie finds himself in the awkward position of trying to simultaneously be the bold truth-teller who claps back at Trump and slams him for inciting the insurrection, as well as the loyal confidante who might even still support him even after all the harsh denunciations, a dynamic that was on bold display during CNN’s Dana Bash-hosted Being…Chris Christie special Monday night.

Bash asked Christie about criticisms against him claiming that, as a longtime supporter of Trump’s, he had enabled him, which he answered with characteristic duality. Plenty of criticism, but no regrets for his 2016 Trump vote.

The thirsty/profile-in-courage tension was maybe most vividly demonstrated when Christie — who had just gotten done humblebragging to Bash that “Any time I objected to the president’s conduct either from a policy or personal perspective, I said it to him. That’s the kind of relationship we have. I didn’t have to hold back and I didn’t.” — gave his interviewer an earnest blow-by-blow of Trump blowing him off on Jan. 6.

He bristled when Bash called it a “cop-out” for Christie to decline ruling out a 2024 Trump vote. And that’s really what makes this such a good interview. “After everything you’ve described that he has done, you still would potentially, would vote for him?” she asked with astonishment after his seemingly contradictory demurral.

Bash got right to the topics that people are actually interested in when it comes to Chris Christie and his new book. The tell-all aspect is good; a telling of all without any self-examination or regret is clickable, watchable, and of actual probative value. His anecdote for The View wasn’t bad, but it was Dana Bash who made it newsy.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made the nutso claim on Monday’s Tucker Carlson Today that Covid-19 vaccines have killed thousands and declared them deadlier than all other vaccines combined.

The anti-vax Kennedy, who claims he is not anti-vax, cited the CDC’s frequently misunderstood Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, (VAERS) to back up his claim. Tucker Carlson himself has touted numbers from VAERS when discussing “the apparent death rate from the coronavirus vaccines” on his show.

In May, Dr. Pradheep J. Shanker spoke with Mediate editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin, who asked the doctor whether a conclusion based on VAERS provides an accurate picture of adverse reactions to vaccines.

“It is not accurate,” he said. “VAERS was intended to cast a wide net to capture any possible or potential complication that even has the remotest possibility of being related to the vaccine. Any adverse event is considered reportable.”

“With hundreds of millions of doses, the likelihood of some percentage of those people dying (especially among the elderly) after vaccination is a certainty. Carlson did nothing to filter out which deaths were expected with or without the vaccine, and which deaths can be tied to the vaccine,” he said.

This is a criticism the current anti-vax crowd made against reporting of covid deaths when they were opposed to taking the pandemic seriously in the first place.

Throughout the pandemic, the people who opposed public measures have repeatedly remarked on complicating factors and comorbidities. Yet on Tucker’s show, he and Kennedy drew broad, inflammatory, alarmist conclusions without accounting for those same factors, or even seemingly indulging any skepticism or journalistic research whatsoever.

And despite that alarm at potential vaccine risks, with regard to covid risk RFK was rather more sanguine, in both the modern and archaic senses of the word.