Pennsylvania Democrat Senator John Fetterman has been in the hospital for nearly two months.
When Fetterman re-emerged he made the rounds in the corporate media to frame his return on his own terms.
And you’ll be speechless when you see what John Fetterman just said.
John Fetterman suffered a near-fatal stroke last May that left him physically and cognitively impaired.
To many Americans that seemed obvious as they saw Fetterman unable to speak simple sentences or once they learned that he was unable to carry on a conversation without computer monitors displaying the transcription of what the other person was saying.
Just weeks into his tenure in the Senate, Fetterman checked into the hospital after complaining about headaches following Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech.
Around two weeks after exiting the hospital Fetterman was back under doctor’s care after admitting he suffered from depression that stemmed from the fact that Fetterman finally realized he would never fully recover from his stroke.
After a 44-day stint in the hospital Fetterman returned to the Senate and immediately sat for interviews with friendly corporate media outlets that would not ask any tough questions and would accept whatever story Fetterman told at face value.
In an interview with National Public Radio, Fetterman sought to recast the cognitive impairments he suffered from after the stroke as the downstream consequences of his very real depression.
“I was so depressed that I didn’t even realize I was depressed. I didn’t even understand it. This, to me, just became the new normal. I wasn’t realizing [that] I wasn’t eating. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t really drinking much,” Fetterman told NPR.
“I dropped 25 pounds. And sometimes I would say things, incoherent things and I would become kind of just [disoriented], and getting lost walking around in Washington,” Fetterman continued.
Critics contend this dubious explanation about Fetterman not being able to speak coherently due to depression did not stand up to scrutiny.
At Fetterman’s first committee hearing back from the hospital Fetterman struggled to make it through his opening statement despite the fact that he was reading it off a screen.
John Fetterman chaired a subcommittee hearing today.
Here is his opening statement. pic.twitter.com/Y6EHYkhkBZ
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) April 19, 2023
Fetterman’s physical and cognitive impairments are very real.
But the last thing Democrats need is for Fetterman to resign because he is unfit to serve and create a special election in 2024 when the party is already defending seats in Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.
And that’s why many believe Fetterman is trying to retcon his issues from a medical problem to a mental health crisis.