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Notes -
What in the fresh hell, Pennsylvania?
Has the Motte discussed John Fetterman? If so, I missed it... I admit there are enough races I'm watching across the country that it is hard to keep track of them all. But in case you, too, have missed it, John Fetterman is the Democratic candidate for the seat of outgoing Senator Pat Toomey, one of 7 Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment circus. Seven days before winning the Primary, John Fetterman had a stroke.
I am not a medical doctor. For all I know, Fetterman will make a full recovery, eventually. But as of right now, the guy is one step above monosyllabic. Which made tonight's debate absolutely excruciating to watch. Over the course of the night, PredictIt shifted ten cents in favor of Fetterman's opponent,
the Wizard ofMehmet Oz. And yet most media accounts of the debate are steadfastly reporting only the substance, such as it was. No surprise--the media has been carrying water for Fetterman for weeks. But like... really? You can't report a single sentence saying, "Fetterman was clearly not up to the task." Watching people hit Twitter to unironically praise him for "doing really well, for a stroke victim!" is shocking. The level of partisanship required to vote for Fetterman at this point simply boggles the mind. On the flip side, #Festerman was briefly trending on Twitter before (I presume) someone elbowed their censors.Of course, we can trust our outspoken President to just tell it like it is. Perhaps President Biden understands better than anyone, given the possibility that he, too, might simply be functioning as a sock puppet for the Democratic establishment. The counterargument that criticizing Fetterman's cognition is some kind of "ableism" is just hollow. This is not a man who can do the job of Senator, at least not right now, and to pretend otherwise just seems exploitative to me. (And calling that a "bad faith" argument seems willfully ignorant. The man can barely speak, that's much more than an "auditory processing" problem.)
Of course, voting has been open for a month in Pennsylvania, and the state has already declared its intention to turn a blind eye to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling as it counts undated ballots. So in addition to potentially electing someone with the mental faculties of a young child to high federal office, Pennsylvania is also setting up a judicial crisis for its election process.
And all because Oz is, well, a Trumpist. If this is what midterms look like, 2024 is going to be... just something else. I can't even imagine. It's simply too much.
I guess I want to speak up for the people who think that Fetterman really wasn’t that bad. For the most part, it was clear what he was trying to say, even though he didn’t express himself fluently and seemed like a nervous middle schooler giving a presentation, or Like he was doing a Chris Farley impression, for the old are millennials among us. He had a lot of canned talking points, of course, because that’s just how debates work nowadays, no actual debating involved.
Unfortunately, in this day and age its always necessary to declare one’s affiliations along with one’s objective judgments of situation, so I need to express my own view by saying my dream would be to vote for a Republican candidate who is actually good, not that phony Mehmet Oz. We know Federman’s excuse, what is Oz’s excuse for not saying anything interesting during the entire debate?
What occurred to me watching the Fetterman debate is that ordinary, American political rhetoric is hard to distinguish from literal brain damage: question-evading, compulsive repetition of simple points, failure to substantially engage with alternative points of view, reliance on memorized/rehearsed lines, introduction of irrelevant themes/ideas, etc.
There were portions of Fetterman's performance where he clearly wasn't communicating like a normal person, but I (literally!) couldn't tell how much was attributable to the stroke-induced impairment vs. how much was just the standard-issue (moronic) political medium.
Eh, about political debates, you can't beat what happened in Poland during the last presidential elections...
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