He won’t let reporters interview his doctor or see his medical records. He stutters and tries to find the right word to say. And most telling of all, he requires a caption machine to print out the question being asked in order for him to respond.
But Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate candidate, Lt. Governor John Fetterman, insists he’ll be ready to serve “from day one.” Anyone who sees his NBC interview with Dasha Burns would beg to differ.
Pennsylvania Lt. Governor and Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman sat down with @DashaBurns in an exclusive interview using closed captioning.
Fetterman discussed his recovery after suffering a stroke in the primaries and his race against Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz. pic.twitter.com/0fee1cKXgY
— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) October 11, 2022
“Every now and then I’ll miss a word. Every now and then. Or sometimes I’ll maybe mush two words together. But as long as I have captioning, I’m able to understand exactly what’s being asked,” he told Burns.
Well, that’s a relief. We’ll just set up a portable monitor to follow you around so when someone asks a question, you can answer.
In the interview, Fetterman can be seen having difficulty attempting to pronounce the word “empathetic,” moving between “emphetic” and “empathetic” before finally landing on the latter. He then used that as an example of the side affects of the stroke.
Fetterman said he is still in the recovery process but that “I don’t think it’s going to have an impact. I feel like I’m gonna get better and better—every day. And by January, I’m going [to] be, you know, much better. And Dr. Oz is still going to be a fraud.”
Burns said that before the interview and without captioning, “it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation.”
Fetterman couldn’t even make it through a basic, friendly interview with MSNBC: couldn’t hear, couldn’t understand.
He’s unfit to serve in the Senate. pic.twitter.com/GIApHtd2AS
— Monica Crowley (@MonicaCrowley) October 11, 2022
If Fetterman is well enough to serve, why won’t he release his medical records or give permission for his doctor to be interviewed? Burns points out that this is critical in evaluating the long-term recovery prospects of a stroke patient.
“What you saw and heard there, the auditory processing challenges, the speech challenges. I’ve spoken with stroke experts. They say folks can fully recover from that, but the caveat that every expert gives is that they can’t fully assess a patient without details on their health records, without that information that the campaign has yet to disclose. We’ve asked multiple times for medical records, for interviews with someone from his medical team. Those requests have been denied to NBC News and other outlets that have requested this as well,” Burns said.
When questioned why he would not supply NBC with medical records or make any of his doctors available for an interview, Fetterman replied: “I feel like we have been very transparent in a lot of different ways. When our doctor has already given a letter saying that I’m able to serve and to be running. And then I think there’s—you can’t be any more transparent than standing up on a stage with 3,000 people and having a speech without a teleprompter and just being—and putting everything and yourself out there like that. I think that’s as transparent as everyone in Pennsylvania can see.”
On his podcast, Clay Travis called the interview “insane. … Imagine what media would be saying if a Republican was trying to pull this campaign off.”
Indeed, try as they might, the folks at NBC News just couldn’t put enough lipstick on this pig to make him presentable. This is sad because Fetterman has a beautiful family and at age 53, has a long life ahead of him. No doubt, the radical fire that burns in Fetterman is driving him forward, but is it really worth risking his health?
Apparently, yes. And after Pennsylvania voters see this interview, they’re going to be asking the same question.
This content was originally published here.