Fetterman's Reassessment

On this day:

1960
The Food and Drug Administration announces it will approve birth control as an additional indication for Searle’s Enovid, making Enovid the world’s first approved oral contraceptive pill.
1979
Iranian Jewish businessman Habib Elghanian is executed by firing squad in Tehran, prompting the mass exodus of the once 100,000 member strong Jewish community of Iran.
1980
In Florida, Liberian freighter MV Summit Venture collides with the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay, making a 1,400-ft. section of the southbound span collapse. 35 people in six cars and a Greyhound bus fall 150 ft. into the water and die.

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Until America goes into decline, there won't be an American pope.--Cardinal George from Chicago (from Chris)

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The White House convened a last-minute meeting to discuss a private mission to the moon after the largest group of Native Americans in the United States asked the administration to delay the flight because it would be carrying cremated human remains destined for a lunar burial.

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Fetterman's Reassessment

There are changes afoot in the information cartel.

Fetterman has long been an interesting guy. Huge (6'8''), tattooed, and rough, he had an epiphany as a young man: when faced with the brevity and inequity of life, he decided it was not a fact of existence but injustice. Fault was involved. He changed his life, became a socialist, married the beautiful Gisele (who might be the brains of the outfit), and entered politics. Like all such political activists, he simply ignores the basic truth that the government power and devotion necessary for such political ambitions are as incompatible with the nation's origin and character as is monarchy. Instead, as all such visionaries, he follows the advice of Blackadder's Anthony Melchett: “If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.” Pigheadedness and the threat of violence.

Suffice it to say, he has been lionized. He became the Mayor of Braddock, a waystation on the bullet train of automation, clean energy, and outsourced labor, and now a violent shell disguised as a town. With no real demonstration of administrative ability or imagination, he ran for Pennsylvania lieutenant-governor and won.

Then he pitted his shallow public appeal against that of TV personality Dr. Oz and won the senate race. As a senator, his major accomplishment seems to be his refusal to follow dress codes. He's a maverick.

Then he had a stroke.

The following months were filled with news accounts of his struggle to return to normal. He could not speak. He required special electronics. Then he was hospitalized for depression, a serious event in any life.

Since then, he has had slow progress back to flouting dress norms.

But things have changed.

A recent news article worried about a shouting match he had at a meeting with the teachers' union.

That interaction at Fetterman’s Washington office, described to The Associated Press by the two people who spoke about it on the condition of anonymity, came the day before New York Magazine published a story in which former staff and political advisers to Fetterman aired concerns about the senator’s mental health.

That story included a 2024 letter, also obtained by the AP, in which Fetterman’s one-time chief of staff Adam Jentleson told a neuropsychiatrist who had treated Fetterman for depression that the senator appeared to be off his recovery plan and was exhibiting alarming behavior, including a tendency toward “long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues.”

And some who have worked closely with Fetterman question publicly whether his recovery is complete.

In the 2024 letter to Dr. David Williamson, Jentleson warned that Fetterman was not seeing his doctors, had pushed out the people who were supposed to help him stay on his recovery plan, and might not be taking his prescribed medications. Jentleson also said Fetterman had been driving recklessly and exhibiting paranoia, isolating him from colleagues.

“Overall, over the last nine months or so, John has dismantled the early-warning system we all agreed upon when he was released,” Jentleson wrote. “He has picked fights with each person involved in that system and used those fights as excuses to push them out and cut them off from any knowledge about his health situation.”

Aristocracies solve leadership questions by birth. Democracies must simply work harder. As the country has shown over the years, democracies pick pretty randomly and need to be lucky. This country has been.

But much of its luck has been tempered by a belief--even among its most incompetent--that the betterment of the nation was somehow at stake. With the Biden experience, the nation no longer has that buffer. Ambition and power have no default mechanism, no circuit breaker. The cabal-that-be will pursue power and keep it at any price, even if it means supporting an addled, demented old man as president of the country and leader of the free world.

What we saw was not simply outrageous lust; we were seeing a complete suppression of responsibility and conscience.

That is what makes this negative Fetterman publicity so shocking. What is going on here?