When news broke on Wednesday evening that Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) had been rushed to the hospital and was being kept “overnight” for observation, I wasn’t sure how to respond.
For months on end, some of us in the conservative commentariat begged and pleaded with Pennsylvanians and the national press to take Fetterman’s health issues seriously. After all, this was a man who had a major stroke just months prior to the campaign and was essentially unintelligible in the only debate he attended.
We were ignored.
As time progressed, it became clear he wasn’t getting any better either. In fact, by the time he did his first major interview, Fetterman was obviously getting worse. Yet, anyone who pointed out the reality of the situation was dismissed and accused of ableism.
On the eve of the election, I wrote an article once again warning Pennsylvanians about the mistake they were about to make. Everything I said turned out to be right.
Something is going on with his health that isn’t being made public, which is almost certainly why he refuses to release his actual medical records. Instead, he relied on a primary care doctor who is a big campaign donor to write him a letter that he’s “fit to be serve,” as Fetterman stated at the debate.
Strokes are not predictable. A lot of people die within a few years of having the type that Fetterman had. Far from a recovery being expected, it is completely possible that he will continue to deteriorate. Certainly, he’s not going to be well enough to actually do his job by January. Pennsylvanians must stop this farce before they end up saddled with Fetterman for six years. I say that because there is no chance his overly ambitious wife, who longs to be a political star, is going to let him resign. It’ll be a cluster, and as of right now, it’s avoidable if voters act.
Fetterman’s overly ambitious wife led the charge to keep her husband in the race, lionized by a compliant media that refused to ask any real questions about the now-senator’s condition. Instead, they wrote glowing profiles of Giselle Fetterman as a warrior against discrimination and the brains behind the campaign.
Meanwhile, those of us with an ounce of intellectual honesty felt like we were in the twilight zone. Fetterman would do a public appearance in which he’d mumble, mix up words, and make no sense at all, and the press would insist it was just a hearing problem.
But what hearing problem results in a person mixing up words and not being able to form complete sentences? The truth of Fetterman’s problems didn’t matter, though. The narrative that it was just an “auditory processing” issue took hold, having been spread far and wide by Democrats desperate to maintain control of the US Senate. That desperation led them to prop up a man who wasn’t qualified for the job and who likely suffered more harm to his health by not dropping out of the race.
In the end, though, I don’t feel sorry for Pennsylvanians. They were handed a clear choice, and while I had my disagreements with Mehmet Oz, he was harmless as a politician. If anything, Oz went out of his way to present himself as middle-of-the-road, and yet, the voters in that state chose Fetterman anyway, ignoring what was being demonstrated plainly in front of their eyes.
That’s on them, and now they get to suffer the consequences.