We're already in the midst of one of the more bizarre election cycles I can recall in my lifetime, but much of the strangeness we're currently seeing may begin to look absolutely normal now that we've had this tale dumped onto our plates. The New Yorker had apparently gotten hold of some potential dirt on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and was preparing to publish it, assuming you believe this qualifies as "dirt" in political terms. RFK found out about it somehow and decided to publish a video explaining the situation so he could get out in front of it. But rather than a story about extramarital affairs or potential corruption, this one involved RFK dumping the body of a dead bear in Central Park in New York in 2014. That sentence alone qualifies this as one of the stranger stories to come down the pike, but when you read into the details of what allegedly led to his decision to do this, none of it makes any sense whatsoever and we really have to question the man's judgment. (NY Post)

He had a bear-y unique experience.

Independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy appeared to fess up to being one of the culprits who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park a decade ago — after abandoning a plan to skin it.

Seemingly trying to preempt a forthcoming story from the New Yorker magazine, Kennedy, 70, bizarrely recounted in a video posted to social media how some of his buddies were drinking and thought it would be a good idea to dump the dead bear off in the park and “make it look like he got hit by a bike.”

The Kennedy scion insisted that he wasn’t drinking when he opted to put an “old bike in his car” — that someone asked him to throw away — next to the deceased animal.

If Kennedy's story is to be believed (and I honestly don't know what to believe at this point), he was on a falconing trip in upstate New York in an area where I frequently hunted when I was young. While driving along, a woman in the car in front of him struck and killed a young bear. The bear was described by reporters at the time as a "cub," but Kennedy just called it "a young bear." There is a photo of the carcass in the linked article. I would guess that the bear was less than six months old. In any event, it was dead. That's sad, but it happens.

Up until this point, there's nothing all that unusual going on. Black bears are very common in the region and I've seen plenty of them. But inexplicably, RFK decided to pick up the body of the bear, put it in his car, and take it home with him. He said he planned to skin the bear and "put the meat in the refrigerator." Upon returning home, he allegedly went out with some friends who were drinking, though RFK claims that he was not. He realized that he wouldn't have time to deal with the bear, so he and his friends decided it would be "a great idea" to ditch the bear's body in Central Park. He supposedly had a damaged bicycle with him that a friend had "asked him to throw away." So they put the bike next to the bear's body thinking that it would look like someone in the park had struck the bear with the bike, killing it. A pedestrian in the park discovered the bear the next day and alerted the authorities, resulting in a brief media surge.

Are you buying any of this story as being remotely plausible? First of all, that bear was so small that the amount of usable meat on it would have been minimal at best, even if you like bear meat. (I don't, personally. Venison is much better.) And the hide would be so small that you couldn't even make a decent-sized rug out of it. There is no need to pick up a road-kill animal in those circumstances. Anyone can contact the New York Wildlife Health Unit ([email protected]) and they will send someone to collect the body.

Even if he realized that he would not have time to process the body and needed to get rid of it, he could just as easily have dumped it by the side of a different rural road and reported it. What possible motivation could RFK and his buddies felt to take it to Central Park? No crime had been committed so there was nothing to cover up. And he just "happened to have" a damaged bicycle with him that a "friend" asked him to dispose of? I'm sure his friend could have figured out how to dispose of his own bike without tasking a member of the Kennedy clan to go to the dump for him. Also, while an automobile strike could definitely kill a very young bear (though usually not an adult, or at least not immediately), nobody is going to kill a black bear of that size by hitting it with a bicycle. It's simply not going to happen. Black bears are tough and they don't die easily, trust me.

This story is nonsensical from beginning to end. What this sounds like is a bunch of drunks who happened to wind up with a dead bear in their possession and decided to play a prank. Either Kennedy was drunk also, or he wasn't but he allowed himself to be talked into this moronic stunt by his drunken friends. Either way, this admission definitely calls the man's judgment into question. In the end, I suppose nobody was really hurt as a result of this misadventure (except the bear, of course), but Kennedy did himself no favors by concocting this tale in an effort to short-circuit a potentially embarrassing article in the middle of a national campaign.