John Fetterman Had A Stroke And The Media Is Here To FREAAAK OUUUUT ABOUT IT!

A runaway win for Fetterman is no fun for the horse-race crowd.

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman had a stroke earlier this year. Doctors suggest the Democratic Senate nominee will fully recover but it should take a few months. It’s not like when Batman’s shot multiple times but is swinging through Gotham on his bat rope the next day.

Tuesday, Fetterman had his first sit-down interview since his stroke with NBC News’s Dasha Burns. You can watch the whole thing here:

 www.youtube.com   

You’ll notice that Fetterman uses closed captioning during the interview. He sometimes struggles with auditory processing so what he hears isn’t fully clear. The captioning offers a precise account of what someone’s said. My wife watches The Crown and Downton Abbe  y with closed captioning, and she’s also fully in command of her faculties. Let’s see Herschel Walker actually read closed captioning in real time during an interview.

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This accommodation is most likely temporary, but if it wasn’t, that wouldn’t mean Fetterman is unable to serve as senator. A disability is not disqualifying. Selling snake oil to gullible people on daytime TV, however, is disqualifying.

But Burns seemed more focused on Fetterman’s disability. Is there anything else he’s keeping from voters? He had the stroke days before the primary election and while trolls might claim this means he has bad judgment or something, there’s no evidence he engaged in some "West Wing"-style conspiracy to hide his health condition. Consider also that for the past year, many Republicans have refused to directly answer if they’d been vaccinated, suggesting this violates their right to privacy. 

Senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe at CBS News tweeted after Burns's interview with Fetterman: "Will Pennsylvanians be comfortable with someone representing them who had to conduct a TV interview this way?” This is incredibly offensive. As MSNBC columnist Eric Michael Garcia noted, how is this different from Tammy Duckworth or Madison Cawthorn using a wheelchair or the many elderly senators who have hearing aids? We repeat: The disability itself or any accommodation for its existence doesn’t mean someone can’t do their job. Dianne Feinstein’s advanced age alone is not the problem.

Axios political reporter Josh Kraushaar tweeted, "NBC News’ Dasha Burns: ‘In small talk before my interview [with Fetterman], it wasn’t clear he understood what I was saying.’” This tweet is still up even though it’s misleading in a sleazy way. Further down his Twitter thread, Kraushaar includes the full quote where Burns told NBC’s Lester Holt, “In small talk before the interview without captioning , it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation.”

Fetterman’s current disability isn’t cognitive. The University of Cincinnati's Pooja Khatri, MD, a stroke expert, confirmed in a September interview that it’s common for people recovering from strokes to have speech and hearing difficulties, but that doesn’t mean they’re otherwise mentally impaired.

KHATRI: I'll have people tell me, "My loved one was confused because they have aphasia," and really, they're actually not confused at all ... They're just having trouble getting the words out that they want to say or understanding what you're saying.

Republicans have cynically promoted the narrative that President Joe Biden is senile just because he’s old. We’d expect that Republicans would exploit Fetterman’s condition for their political gain. Politics is very much about appearances, and unfortunately we haven’t progressed that much as a society since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hid his paralysis from the public (even while on the campaign trail!). It’s still disappointing, though, that members of the media would both cruelly and cluelessly express such obviously ableist sentiment.

Podcaster Kara Swisher clapped back on Burns brilliantly:  

“Listen to the interview in which we did not edit the ums or ahs out as we typically do for everyone else. There were few slips — I had more — and at no moment did he seem distracted: https://t.co/ZdWDI6MifV”

— Kara Swisher (@Kara Swisher) 1665535723 

SWISHER: Sorry to say but I talked to John Fetterman for over an hour without stop or aides and this is just nonsense. Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk. 

Swisher had a stroke in 2011, and she wrote “the most irksome thing for me ... is all Dr. Google folks who kept trying to give me advice ('Slow down,' they’d say; 'Fuck you,' I’d reply) or study my speech for signs of trouble. It is a slow recovery but many younger people do just fine.”

Fetterman, who’s regularly pantsed Dr. Mehmet Oz on social media, has agreed to debate his Republican opponent but has asked for the same closed captioning accommodation. Dr. Oz would love for fence-sitting voters to assume that this means Fetterman isn’t fit to serve in the same Senate as Marsha Blackburn. But Fetterman put it best:  "Recovering from a stroke in public isn’t easy. But in January, I’m going to be much better – and Dr. Oz will still be a fraud.”

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