Remember the debate over John Fetterman’s mental health during the 2022 cycle? Fetterman had suffered a debilitating stroke as the primaries concluded in Pennsylvania, but refused to relinquish the nomination. Republicans argued that Fetterman was not fit for office, but Pennsylvania voters elected him over Mehmet Oz anyway. That was in large part due to Democrats rallying around Fetterman and insisting he was fit for office.
Two-plus years later, Fetterman appears to have proven himself correct. He has recovered from his stroke and works a normal schedule on Capitol Hill. But suddenly his mental health is back at issue — not by Republicans, but by the same Democrats who vouched for Fetterman in 2022. Why? Well, according to New York magazine, he considered a vote confirm Pete Hegseth and supports Israel against Hamas.
He must be crazy!
The back-and-forth led to what one person in his office at the time called a full-blown meltdown. According to a contemporaneous text message from this staffer sent to a colleague, Fetterman had become so distraught about the Hegseth vote, as well as chatter in the media that he might switch parties and become a Republican, that he spent part of the day locked in his office, fighting with Gisele and crying while FaceTiming with staff. “He says that they are trying to cancel him again but we don’t know who ‘they’ are,” a staffer said in a text. Fetterman ultimately voted against Hegseth’s nomination. In a statement, Fetterman said, “My no vote on Pete Hegseth speaks for itself. The rest is pure conjecture.” …
In early November, just weeks after the attack, Gisele arrived at her husband’s Senate office and, according to a staffer present, they got into a heated argument.
“They are bombing refugee camps. How can you support this?” the staffer recalled her saying with tears in her eyes.
“That’s all propaganda,” Fetterman replied.
Later, a still visibly upset Gisele pulled the staffer aside. She asked him if members of Fetterman’s team were pushing him to take these stances for political reasons. The staffer told her that the opposite was true: Many of them were as upset as she was. “If you’re pushing back on this, there’s no hope,” the staffer recalled her saying. “This is horrible news.”
Is this evidence of cognitive impairment? Or is it evidence of someone dealing in objective reality and rejecting the Democrat Party radicals? The entire passage about Hegseth as some sort of indication of mental illness or incapacity is absolutely hilarious. Just the fact that Fetterman gave Hegseth a fair hearing and consideration now qualifies as incapacity. And suggesting that starting wars with Israel leads to bad consequences apparently does, too.
On top of that, this comes after four years of Democrat cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive disability. Where were all these crying Democrats from 2021-2025 regarding that mental and physical collapse? This passage alone brings that into sharp relief:
Now, even though he requires the help of captioning on an iPhone to deal with an auditory-processing impediment, he remains a promising politician, at least to casual observers. He still exudes an elusive sense of authenticity, someone who can chop it up with manosphere chieftains like Joe Rogan while maintaining his strong stance on trans rights.
I seem to recall when these same Democrats insisted in the fall of 2022 that Fetterman’s use of captioning equipment for interviews was nothing more than a reasonable accommodation. I also recall that Joe Biden could barely get through a speech and off the stage without going through aphasia at points, trailing off and mumbling, which Democrats insisted was just Biden’s childhood stutter returning. Fetterman actually has held his own in interviews with Rogan and others, even while using captioning devices, unlike Biden — who barely interacted with reporters, and needed cheat sheets with the questions submitted in advance to do so.
This all seems very, very familiar. During the 2018 confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats got angry with Dianne Feinstein for not being tough enough during their character assassination, mainly just because her leak of the Blasey Ford accusation didn’t keep Kavanaugh off the court. When she thanked Lindsey Graham and gave him a hug for his handling of the 2020 confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, the Left went nuts. Remember?
I really can’t get over what a betrayal this moment was to the thousands (millions?) of progressive activists who have worked their asses off fighting Barrett’s confirmation tooth and nail. Feinstein should be ashamed, and she should step down immediately. https://t.co/uPVDeQgrlC
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 15, 2020
Less than two months later, the New Yorker then ran a deep dive on Feinstein’s declining cognition. This had apparently been inside knowledge for a few years among Senate Democrats and staff, a period which would have included at least one of her re-election campaigns (in 2018, at least). Yet Democrats only started making those concerns public when Feinstein had the temerity to treat a Republican with comity and respect rather than stick to all-out war.
Plus, the New Yorker article by Jane Mayer reported symptoms that would hev been significant and clear evidence of decline. It didn’t cite consideration of a vote on a nominee or support for Israel as a sign of non compos mentis. Mayer’s report included real signs of encroaching dementia:
Speaking on background, and with respect for her accomplished career, they say her short-term memory has grown so poor that she often forgets she has been briefed on a topic, accusing her staff of failing to do so just after they have. They describe Feinstein as forgetting what she has said and getting upset when she can’t keep up. One aide to another senator described what he called a “Kabuki” meeting in which Feinstein’s staff tried to steer her through a proposed piece of legislation that she protested was “just words” which “make no sense.” …
Feinstein seemed to forget about the conversations soon after they talked, so Schumer had to confront her again. “It was like Groundhog Day, but with the pain fresh each time.” Anyone who has tried to take the car keys away from an elderly relative knows how hard it can be, he said, adding that, in this case, “It wasn’t just about a car. It was about the U.S. Senate.”
In a couple of years, those symptoms would start showing up more publicly, validating Mayer’s earlier reporting on the late Senator. However, the timing of this sudden desire of anonymous Democrats to leak this information to the media certainly suggested a punitive motive, or at the very least an attempt to humiliate Feinstein into resigning in order to allow Gavin Newsom to appoint a more reliably pugilistic progressive to take her place.
It looks like Democrat insiders are trying to run that same playbook with Fetterman, on a much more absurd basis. And let’s not forget a much more hypocritical basis, after putting the country through the Four Year Biden Regency without ever coming clean about who really called the shots in his White House.
Addendum: The NYMag piece is paywalled. However, the Vox Media PR group sent out promotional emails with “highlights” from their report, which suggests that these are the, um, strongest arguments they can make about Fetterman’s supposedly declining cognition.
