Unfit To Serve
The press is still pretending Fetterman’s fine
SEN. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) isn’t capable of serving as a United States senator. Many people knew that before he was elected. Some of them even said that before he was elected.
Those who did were charged with “ableism,” meaning that they took for granted that people running for senator should have the requisite physical and mental qualities to do the job of senator.
Fetterman doesn’t have those, and it’s very possible he never will. He often can’t understand voices because his brain has suffered damage that keeps him from processing what his ears hear. It’s not that his hearing is impaired, it’s that his cognition is.
Even a recent New York Times puff piece admits voices sound like the adults in the “Peanuts” cartoons to him — indecipherable noise — and his health problems have left him with “physical impairment and serious mental health challenges.”
Fetterman’s own doctors have admitted he’s suffering from brain damage, and the medical “fit to serve” letter his campaign flourished before the election came from a doctor who was also a major Democratic donor.
Last week, Fetterman was hospitalized after feeling lightheaded, for fear of another stroke. After a couple days he was released, but it’s impossible to put a good spin on his condition, though God knows the Times tried.
Still, the Times tells us that although Fetterman wasn’t willing to be interviewed, “aides and confidantes describe his introduction to the Senate as a difficult period, filled with unfamiliar duties that are taxing for someone still in recovery.”
He “cannot partake in the hallway scrums with journalists that are part of most lawmakers’ daily existence in the Capitol,” the paper noted. “Fetterman, who as lieutenant governor had reporters’ numbers in his cellphone and had near-constant running conversations with some of them, has stopped interacting with journalists, whose voices he often cannot hear in the echoing hallways.”
Well, another reason Fetterman may have stopped interacting with journalists is they might say something unflattering. On Oct. 7, NBC’s Dasha Burns interviewed him live and on-camera. When she later told NBC’s Lester Holt that Fetterman didn’t seem able to follow the conversation, she was dogpiled by lefty activists — and her fellow journalists.
Her statement was called “disgraceful,” “trash” and, of course, “ableist.” She was denounced on the air by Savannah Guthrie and in the pages of the Times.
Her real sin, of course, wasn’t one of etiquette or lack of compassion, but one today’s media find far more serious: She had said something that might hurt a Democratic candidate in an important election. That’s the one truly unforgivable sin.
But nobody really wants to come right out and admit that the press actively sees itself as a bunch of Democratic Party operatives, even though, in fact, the press actively sees itself as a bunch of Democratic Party operatives.
Back when I used to write for USA Today, I penned a column about the media’s refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story that this paper had just broken. When I submitted it, the paper declined to run it as scheduled; I was told that tricky questions of journalistic ethics meant it would have to be reviewed by another editor the next week.
There were no tricky questions of journalistic ethics. The laptop was obtained legally — not that the press minds “hacked” information when it makes Republicans look bad — and there was no serious doubt it was Hunter Biden’s.
But, with an election looming, I suspect nobody wanted a major national newspaper to give notice to dramatic evidence of Biden family corruption and how the national news media were deliberately sitting on it to influence the election. More like “We don’t want to publish this, and we don’t want the flak we’ll get from our peers for publishing it.”
(My response was to leave USA Today and start writing for The Post.)
For that matter, the press happily allowed Joe Biden to campaign from his basement, avoid any serious press interviews and deflect concerns about his mental and physical health with talk of ageism and — you guessed it — ableism.
Of course, now that Biden looks to be becoming a liability to the party, it’s suddenly OK to talk about his problems, and charges of ableism and ageism, to say nothing of journalistic “ethics,” are disappearing. The press’s etiquette and ethics are nothing if not flexible.
So watch out, Sen. Fetterman. When they’re ready to replace you, the tone will change overnight.