PA-SN 2022 megathread: Shrek vs. The Wizard of Oz

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Holy crap what an awful ad!
https://twitter.com/droz/status/1547682878565150720?s=21

Dr. Oz says he is praying for John Fetterman....interesting. Many people are asking if he was praying to the Muslim God!

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I honestly don't care about this. Using dogs for medical research is very legitimate. On the other hand, I fully support doing whatever it takes to allow Fetterman to win and this is a great dog whistle. It reminds me of the classic "Barack Obama ate dogs in Indonesia". Very fun way to remind people that Dr. Oz is a Turk and also Muslim.

Is this stupid? Yes, of course it is. It's also stupid that Fetterman is being smeared for working really hard to rehabilitate two guys who deserved a 2nd chance after being imprisoned. That doesn't make him "soft on crime" (he chased a guy down with a gun), it makes him a good person. Oz deserves this.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I suspect that this will backfire on Republicans. The main issue is that this will draw everyone's attention to John Fetterman and so long as he successfully speaks in complete sentences, he'll receive adoring media coverage. Also, everyone loves a recovery from tragedy so people will want to believe that he's recovered.

Obviously, various sickos and monsters want this to work, want to believe that people would vote for a literal "globalist" elite quack doctor who served in the Turkish military over a normal Democratic politician because the latter has some health problems.

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If the Fetterman campaign is smart, they'll go all-in on a strategy to hit Oz for serving in the Turkish military and hint at him being Muslim in the last week. Democrats will hate this but, guess what? Most of them will have already voted via absentee ballot!

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If the media wants to crucify Fetterman for the unchosen 'crime' of having a stroke, time to go nuclear on Oz for his unchosen heritage and past fidelity to a foreign government in a part of the world that Americans distrust!

The Turk will be thwarted on the banks of the Delaware, aided by winged Polish-American retirees from the coalfields of western PA.

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Fetterman makes Herschel Walker look like Barack Obama.  So sad, he really needs to get help.. this is painful to watch.

Inspiring: low IQ wife-beater and deadbeat Dad owns and destroys man with aphasia in the realm of communications!

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I was nervous before the debate, and I'm scared to death now. I'd like to say "debates don't matter" but this one will of course when the media gives the W to Oz. Democrats are consistently held to higher standards, in every category.

Omg dude

This is beyond politics

The Democratic Party is actively engaging in special needs abuse by putting this unwell man on a debate stage

He
Cannot
Talk

This is ridiculous pablum. Wasn't Oz egging him on to debate? The whole point of this exercise was for Oz to humiliate someone with aphasia. The whole point of the Oz campaign is to make fun of Fetterman for having a stroke and, also, to accuse him of coddling criminals.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Anyways folks, Fetterman will likely lose but it won't be due to this debate. In the end, I think swing voters will have sympathy for him (his favorables remain fine) and, clearly, they think Dr. Oz is an insincere douchebag but they'll tend to prefer Oz because of "the issues". In other words, unless Fetterman was a truly special candidate, he was always at risk of losing.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

What I can't shake here is the implication embedded in all of the posts from our "friends" on the other side, which is that if you've had a stroke that causes aphasia, you are either disqualified from public service because it's somehow an immutable characteristic or you should retire from public life and "focus on recovery" i.e. more or less retire to nursing home. If anything horrible has ever happened to you? It's time to basically give up on life because if you do that, it helps some scumbag snake oil peddler with a R behind their name get elected to Senate.

John Fetterman is 53 years old. His brain is almost certainly in better shape than the brain of Chuck Grassley and we can expect Fetterman will be alive for much longer than Grassley will be alive. Yet we're subjected to a torrent of abuse when Grassley is effectively running as a rotting corpse. It isn't insulting to mention this about Grassley because the curse of our mortality and fragility in old age is a fact of human life - he is doomed to die sooner rather than later.

The hypocrisy and lack of self-reflection here is stunning. It is possible to hope for your candidate to win without signaling that a father with children who seems to basically be a good guy is a reprobate and also a vegetable.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

What I can't shake here is the implication embedded in all of the posts from our "friends" on the other side, which is that if you've had a stroke that causes aphasia, you are either disqualified from public service because it's somehow an immutable characteristic or you should retire from public life and "focus on recovery" i.e. more or less retire to nursing home. If anything horrible has ever happened to you? It's time to basically give up on life because if you do that, it helps some scumbag snake oil peddler with a R behind their name get elected to Senate.

John Fetterman is 53 years old. His brain is almost certainly in better shape than the brain of Chuck Grassley and we can expect Fetterman will be alive for much longer than Grassley will be alive. Yet we're subjected to a torrent of abuse when Grassley is effectively running as a rotting corpse. It isn't insulting to mention this about Grassley because the curse of our mortality and fragility in old age is a fact of human life - he is doomed to die sooner rather than later.

The hypocrisy and lack of self-reflection here is stunning. It is possible to hope for your candidate to win without signaling that a father with children who seems to basically be a good guy is a reprobate and also a vegetable.

You know this how?

You people keep demonstrating why this frenzied defense of Fetterman is such a turnoff. You know it's a bad situation but you think if you just talk enough, regardless of whether you know what the hell you're talking about, it will just go away.

Undecided voters don't want to hear "don't worry, his brain is fine" from someone whose basis for saying that is nothing beyond wishful thinking. They don't to hear what-about-ing about Herschel Walker or Chuck Grassley.

Undecided voters want to know why you people insisted Fetterman was ready to debate and would be fine, and he wasn't. What happened? And why should anyone believe this is the last time the Fetterman campaign will offer reassurances that turn out to be empty?

He turned up to the debate and had problems communicating, which is perfectly consistent with stroke-induced aphasia. Another fact is that aphasia is a condition that may be overcome, albeit with a lot of effort, relatively swiftly - not over 4 months but over a few years. There is no "whataboutism" here. Fetterman performed miserably: he had a stroke and has aphasia. I don't think this is a problem because it's a temporary condition.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

The collective delusion here is ridiculous.

Rather than acknowledge the poor optics, many people opted instead to take on the burdens of any disabled person anywhere who has been treated unfairly, and by extension, gain the "moral high ground" by then accusing anyone who doesn't share their perspective of ableism.  Does this tactic remind you of previous electoral successes?

It is this utter refusal to use your own eyes and ears, and to instead absorb and parrot The Line, and conveniently it means that your opponents are bigots so you don't even need to engage in the courtesy of debating their ideas.  If anything, Fetterman's communication shortcomings overshadowed the fact that he repeatedly, shamelessly lied about his position on a number of issues.

I will give Fetterman credit though, at least he isn't a total piece of dirt who is running a scare campaign about Oz's religion and national origin like some people here would desperately like him to do.

Greetings, old friend. The point of my post was to say that your side of the aisle should be focused on Fetterman's positions on the issues, not on his problems on communicating induced by a stroke. What the "optics" are doesn't really concern me - it looks bad, yes, voters are entitled to feel wary but I dislike the sense from Republicans of gleeful celebration that "Fetterman's brain is cooked" or whatever. This is a man with children who is 53.

My view is that Fetterman will lose based on the issues, not based on the stroke, because most voters are basically decent people who feel bad for him and will tend to think he seems like a decent guy. In terms of Dr. Oz's national heritage, I am trolling about that first and foremost, but I do think he should answer for serving in the Turkish military as a native-born American. I don't think this is a "nativist" attack because Dr. Oz was born here, clearly is very American - so why did he make the choice to do that? I can't say I ever had an impulse to serve in the Mexican military, which is one reason why this is bizarre to me.

In any event, I can't say I understand what your slam dunk case is for voting Republican. I understand that the voters are justifiably angry and that they will do this to punish incumbents but Republicans don't have any solutions whatsoever for dealing with inflation. They're still the party of elites and the powerful and their main objective is steering resources to the rich. Their entire party apparatus has an understanding of economics that appears to consist of "give money to rich good, tax cut good, government spending bad". I haven't been happy with Democrats but this is a joke.

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Fetterman's first four words from the debate were "Hello. Good night everybody."  It just kept worse and worse as the night moved along.  Fetterman is objectively the worst candidate running for Senate.  He literally cannot communicate ideas.  He can't even engage in small talk.  But what about Walker?  He clearly performed better than Fetterman.  I don't even have to examine the political arguments, or fact check the statements, to come to that conclusion.  

The argument here is that based on motivating reasoning and magical thinking you can decide that blue equals green and that your wife is a gorgeous supermodel and so on. Guess what - you can't do that! John Fetterman is terrible at communicating but he can, clearly, communicate ideas, albeit badly. He obviously can engage in "small talk" - it's just difficult for him.

Again, my view is that Dr. Oz will win because of "the issues", not due to Fetterman having a stroke. Your side can simply say "it's sad Fetterman had a stroke, I hope he gets better, but Dr. Oz should win because America is a mess and Republicans can fix it". Really not hard to behave like civilized people...

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Federalist just came out with a painfully silly attack on Fetterman.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/28/john-fettermans-trump-voting-republican-parents-are-card-carrying-democrats/

“We want to tell you something about John Fetterman. He was raised by two Trump-voting Republicans right here in this house in York,” Karl and Susan Fetterman claim in the 30-second video. “Us!”

The problem is that Fetterman’s parents are not Trump supporters or Republicans. According to voting records obtained by The Federalist, Susan and Karl Fetterman have been voting Democrat for at least six years—beginning when the couple registered as Democrats to vote in the 2016 primaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_Senate_election_in_Pennsylvania#Democratic_primary

Not sure why this is silly. He had his parents feature in an ad explicitly for his campaign and in that ad they blatantly lied expecting not to get called out on it.

Really weird that they would register as Democrats to vote for their own son.