Real senator, or wax figurine?
Full text of the article in case you can’t be bothered to click:
Is it normal for a sitting senator to have to routinely submit proofs of life to a public who suspect he might be braindead? Just asking for 340 million friends in the US. Mitch McConnell was hospitalized for a medical event on 14 June and we are now in week six of What on Earth Is Going on With Mitch? – a mystery that has riveted the nation.
According to McConnell’s team there isn’t actually a mystery at all. The 84-year-old is doing great, they want us to know. So great that they have now released two photos to prove it.
The first was made public on Sunday 12 July, almost a month after McConnell’s hospitalization and appears to have been prompted in part by Trump ally and far-right agent of chaos Laura Loomer’s claim that Mitch was “officially brain dead”.
Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, had also just sent a letter to McConnell asking him to be transparent and put an end to the speculation about his health. Funnily enough, the day before that photo came out, I’d published a column with the headline “Is Mitch McConnell secretly deceased?”
Rarely is a question answered so quickly. Perhaps, as my next offering to the mischievous headline gods, I’ll put out a piece titled: “Is Benjamin Netanyahu going to escape accountability forever?”
The Mitch McConnell mystery is solved. But it doesn’t look good for America
But back to that photo, which we’ll call Proof of Life One (POL1). Mitch, I’ll be honest, looked pretty good. He was wearing a nice pink shirt and his wife was standing next to him with her mouth stretched into something resembling a human smile.
I wouldn’t say she was caressing him exactly, but she had a hand under his arm. Mitch was also holding a copy of the day’s Washington Post Sports section so we could all see that he was not secretly deceased. Very normal stuff!
Our tech overlords have ushered in a world where no one can be ever sure that visual evidence is real and POL1 immediately set off rabid speculation that the photo was AI.
There is, I should note, no evidence whatsoever that the photo was AI. But there is also no evidence that McConnell had any idea what was going on in that photo, or that he is in a fit state to continue serving his constituents. His office put out a statement saying he’d had a fall in his home and had subsequently been treated for pneumonia, but we still haven’t actually heard directly from the senator.
All of which is why POL1 did not put an end to the speculation that McConnell’s office is hiding details about the senator’s condition from the public. So, on Monday, to try and quell a new round of speculation, his office released a new photo dated 26 July, which we’ll call Proof of Life Two (POL2).
This photo is pretty similar to the first one, except the senator is in a blue shirt. His office also put out a statement saying the senator is out of hospital, but still having “intense physical therapy” and wouldn’t be able to travel to the annual Fancy Farm picnic in western Kentucky. The statement did not say when he might be expected back in the Senate, which is scheduled to break for a month on 7 August. He has already missed 38 votes.
Once again, this photo of an apparently living, breathing Mitch has not put an end to the questions around McConnell’s health. If the issue is his mobility rather than his mental capacity, why can’t McConnell come into the Senate in a wheelchair to do his job?
That’s what happened last year, after all, after he suffered a fall and then was seen using a wheelchair at the Capitol. Demanding more transparency from a public servant who is collecting a taxpayer-funded salary to represent his constituents is not unreasonable.
Indeed, if McConnell were in perfect health and a Democratic senator were in this position, McConnell would be leading the charge to ensure they resigned. The man has never been interested in empathy or civility, just power.
It looks like Kentucky’s governor hasn’t been reassured by POL2 either. On Monday, Beshear renewed his calls for transparency, asking the senator to directly address Kentuckians about his health or resign.
“As Governor of the state you serve, I am calling on you to directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign,” Beshear wrote in a letter. “If you are unwilling to voluntarily show that you still have the capacity to serve, I will insist Leader Thune fully investigate your condition, report to the American people, and begin the process [to fill your Senate seat] if warranted.”
Is this letter finally going to lead to answers? I don’t know. But I do know that it’s highly likely that a situation like this is going to happen again. Regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, US lawmakers seem determined to cling to power until they die at their desks.
Earlier this month, Senator Lindsey Graham became the fourth member of the US Senate since 2013 to have died while in office and the sixth member of Congress to have died while serving in the 119th Congress. Because the US is the greatest democracy in the world, Graham has now been replaced in the Senate by his sister Darline.
Lindsey Graham’s hawkish ideology leaves a legacy of destruction
And if lawmakers aren’t dying in office, then they’re vanishing from their responsibilities without feeling the need to be transparent with their constituents.
In 2024, for example, a reporter discovered that Kay Granger, a Republican congresswoman from Texas, who hadn’t cast a vote in months, was dealing with “dementia issues” at a senior living facility. Her office hadn’t felt the need to disclose this to the public.
There was also some speculation that House Republican leaders had been aware of the situation and deliberately chose to keep the information quiet to maintain their majority.
And earlier this year Tom Kean Jr, a Republican, went off the radar for almost four months. He missed more than 100 votes but continued to collect his salary. Eventually he resurfaced and said he’d been to inpatient treatment for depression and hadn’t wanted to explain because he was a private person. Which is fair enough. But then may I suggest that a job in public office isn’t for you?
It’s funny, isn’t it? There are millions of Americans who are never going to have the funds to retire. Who are going to be forced to work for minimum wage until they keel over on the job. Our lawmakers, however, have excellent salaries and an array of taxpayer-funded health benefits. They can retire early if they choose to do so. It’s a tragedy for our democracy that more of them don’t.
-Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead
It’s not that I couldn’t be bothered to click. It’s just that your text is just that. Just text. Sooooooo many of these news sites have formatting on their pages so when you scroll, it scrolls the text off the screen, and right into a full page ad that can’t be closed. You have to scroll more to get the rest of the text.
Then other sites have so much popup bullshit, and redirections, and automatically playing videos.
It’s a lot.
So I appriciate your text recap. Not because I can’t be bothered to click a link, but because they can’t be bothered to display the story on a webpage that isn’t infuriating to have to deal with. Your text recap is just the story, no bullshit. And I appriciate that. Upvote for you!
The link is from The Guardian, which doesn’t do all that. I only get a cookie prompt from them, and there’s no funny business after that.
But you have to go there to actually find out!
That must be a location thing because most links to their website gives a “accept cookies or deny and subscribe (which means paying them).” The link for this post didn’t show anything, but I’ve learned to not click links to their website because of the above mentioned. And I use an adblocker which removes the cookie popup most of the time but the guardian is one of the websites where it rarely works.
Here’s the photo to save you clicking through to the article it referenced (where the photo wouldn’t actually load for me, so I had to search for it separately). They didn’t even give him a newspaper this time. There’s no way his brain is ok
why do asian american women always date the worst white men?
has there been an atlantic article about this?
The stereotype of white men going to an Asian or east Europe country to get a wife holds strong through all levels of wealth and political power. No one who has any idea of who they are would ever chose them, and they’d never marry a black woman. Even having an Asian one is a bit much for many of them.
The asymmetries are weird, too. Like you don’t see many Asian men partnered with Black women, or Arab women with white men.
I’m glad I could help!
Dude even my ad blocker won’t stop that shit on some sites. If I crank it up to Max the sites won’t even let me in. I hate the Internet.
You might appreciate
The automatic playing video that scrolls down with the text and blocks 50% of the screen is my personal favourite.
If you happen to use Firefox, uBlock Origin works on both desktop and mobile!
Dianne Feinstein.
You sure?
I don’t think you get it.
deleted by creator
If the US survives fascism maybe we can make laws that say if you miss tons of votes it’s assumed you can’t do your job and you get fired. Oh, and some term and age limits. Please and thank you.
Earlier this month, Senator Lindsey Graham became the fourth member of the US Senate since 2013 to have died while in office and the sixth member of Congress to have died while serving in the 119th Congress. Because the US is the greatest democracy in the world, Graham has now been replaced in the Senate by his sister Darline.
That really is a tremendous paragraph.
Wait, who elected Darline? Are we in a nepo state now?
Oof don’t look through our past presidents or other governmental types and see how often the same family names come up. “always has been” meme is unfortunately fitting here.
South Carolina governor appoints people to the seats of deceased Congress members for the remainder of their term, that really isn’t unusual or shady. It just so happens he appointed LG’s younger sister, which is more unusual and shady.
I’m not sure if I’d say “now” exactly…
Only five more days until Mitch McConnell’s team announces that his health has taken a “sudden and inexplicable” turn for the worse.
Is there something in particular they are waiting for?
The threshold to not call a special election, or something of the kind.
They dont want to lose that seat to voters before they can slide their own handpicked replacement.
Worse than that. A replacement elected in November wouldn’t take office until January. They’d rather keep the seat vacant than risk having a Dem win the seat, because they plan on fucking with the November election results prior to the new Senate being seated, and another Democratic Senator placed into office earlier would make it much harder to push it through the Senate.
How does the GOP have such a low confidence in Kentucky, too. It went 64% to Trump in 2024. Make it make sense…
Honestly I’m not even sure what the point is. McConnell isn’t running for reelection. Even without this incident, he wouldn’t have been the Senator from Kentucky come next year. It seems an awful lot of trouble to go to in order to hold a seat for a few months, especially when it wouldn’t affect the balance of power in the chamber.
Aha, that makes this all make more sense, thanks.
He was doing absolutely fine up until bit started to drop off.
And earlier this year Tom Kean Jr, a Republican, went off the radar for almost four months. He missed more than 100 votes but continued to collect his salary. Eventually he resurfaced and said he’d been to inpatient treatment for depression and hadn’t wanted to explain
Here I was thinking six weeks absent from my job would be outrageous enough. I’m pretty sure after 100 day absence, with no contact whatsoever, they’d not only have stopped paying me, but have already replaced me and had a whip round for my next of kin.
But you’re just filthy meat, not a wealthy insider.
The point of you is to work breed and die. If you aren’t doing either of the first two, you are encouraged and assisted in the third.
Mitch is a real person ±1 soul
In any normal job, you’d get fired by day 3 of no show, no explanation.
Some jobs would just take 1 day.
But it’s ok, being a congressman isn’t like an important job or anything, right?
In my company it’s like 10 days because they use this really awful third party HR company who are incredibly slow at passing the message along.
One time I was off sick for 3 days with food poisoning and I told them about it on the first day but they didn’t pass the message along until after I’d already got back. They called up told me I had food poisoning 5 days ago.
You can’t just fire him! Think about the bribes and lobby money they invested in him. They would have to start at 0 again with a new candidate.
Where the shit do you work where youd get cut after 1 day ?
In some positions, not showing up with no heads up, no explanation, can cost the company a shitload of money. Filmmaking for example, you might have a location booked to shoot at for the day, some important person doesn’t show up, you can’t shoot your scenes. And actors aren’t the only people who could potentially hold up a shoot.
Indeed, if McConnell were in perfect health and a Democratic senator were in this position, McConnell would be leading the charge to ensure they resigned.
No, McConnell wouldn’t “ensure someone resigned”, he’d use some procedural trick to remove them from office and have a Republican of his choosing fill the seat. And, he’d do it even if he knew full well that the person was alive, conscious, fully in possession of their faculties, but somehow unable to defend against that kind of a dirty trick.
The governor of Kentucky should simply replace McConnell, and if it turns out that McConnell is, in fact, up to continuing to serve in the senate, he can fight to get his seat back.
Regardless of whether or not he is actually dead, if he’s ill enough that it’s even a question, that surely must mean he isn’t doing his job.
Well, it’s kinda nice that he isn’t doing his job …
His job is stalling though, so, he kind of is actually. I wouldn’t be surprised if “weekend at Bernie my ass if I die in an election year” was in his will.
Whether he’s dead or not, an 84 year old should have retired a decade or two ago. It’s not like he couldn’t afford to.
there really ought to be an age limit to being in government, in much the same way you have to be over a certain age to run for pres.
Minimum age is insane to me as well. In AU it’s like “Well you have to be a legal adult to become a member of the house of representatives” so that’s the closest we have.
Cut politicians off at 70 bare minimum
waaaaay before 70. at 70, they likely have some dementia. I’m thinking 60.
There’s plenty of 70 year olds cooking your arse son. Having said that, if it’s for a 4 year term I agree they shouldnt be able to run after 72-75 . There are some very energetic 79 year olds. There’s also plenty that are 5 years away from death.
The risk of dementia goes upb with age but there are many many 70-year-olds wandering around who are still perfectly capable. In fact I would be willing to bet that the majority of 70-year-olds don’t have dementia.
My 96 year old neighbor is building something out of wood with his table saw in his garage right now after driving his truck to the lumber yard this morning. Broadly speaking I get cutting people off but sixties would be wild to me. I’m not all that far off from my sixties, I think I used to think that seemed older than it was in my twenties and thirties.
My grandfather kept all his marbles until he died at 101. Last time I saw him, about a year before that, he was still whipping me at chess. I was a strong player at the time.
I’m 70 now, still doing software full-time in a highly technical organization, and I can still write tight, clean code more quickly than most. I mainly do it for proofs of concept, such as when the dev team are being risk-averse and say something can’t be done that I know actually can be. I have less physical stamina than I did in my 20s, but my mental acuity’s just fine so far.
Dementia odds do go up, but are still not that high in one’s 70s, and are even lower if, like me, you have good cardio fitness and eat a healthy diet. That lessens the chances of vascular dementia. Harder to say if it helps with Alzheimers, since there’s a significant hereditary component to that, and research isn’t clear on how big that might be.
So try being fact-based when you’re proposing political solutions. Every day, we’re seeing what happens when politics is being driven by prejudice rather than truth. We don’t need more of that.
I’m aiming this upthread, not so much at the post I’m directly replying to, which I agree with.
I don’t think there should be an age limit but I don’t think it’s unreasonable beyond a certain age to require people to prove cognitive function. There are many countries in the world where they do that for driving tests which seems perfectly reasonable.
The problem is we have a generational conveyor belt problem.
The 80 year olds are running the Senate, taking the jobs the 70 year olds should have. The 70 year olds are holding the jobs of the 60 year olds. Etc.
If you implement term limits, there’s inevitably going to be a generation of leaders that never gets a shot at the top posts. Imagine you’re a Senator in your 70s. You’ve been waiting patiently for leadership posts for years, working jobs that should have been for someone 10-20 years younger than you. You were told to wait your turn, and you did! You did everything you were supposed to. Then some young upstart comes along and wants to implement term limits that will mean you’ll never get that shot at leadership you’ve been waiting years for. Would you support term limits?
If there are ever going to be term limits, they’ll have to be implemented by a constitutional convention or mass popular movement voting out any leader that won’t support term limits.
Such people would have to let go of the wheels of power, take their snouts out of the trough, unlink their brokerage account from all that sweet sweet insider info and stop doing favors to extremely grateful friends.
Obviously, they’re not going to do that unless they literally have no other option.
It’s a mental illness.
Charlie Kirk was Mitch the whole time?
looks like elaine chaos body switching spell worked, need a younger body.
LICH MCCONNEL cant be observed if hes both dead or alive, unless you are a necromancer capable of seeing the “veil” between life and death
Taxation without Representation
Well, the blue states — who actually pay more taxes than they receive back — are already being ignored by this administration.
So are all Americans who live outside the USA, and are taxed but receive no representation.
I cannot understand anyone who managed to get out of that shitty place not renouncing their citizenship at the first opportunity
deleted by creator
'Murica is a fucking joke
One that has never actually been funny
It’s a Schrödinger’s senator
Let’s just say I’m glad I don’t have to vote against that dead motherfucker anymore!
He was born in 1942. Imagine all the wonderful things he could have done with his life!
Or at the very least retired 25 years ago.
I’m sure he did plenty of wonderful things for his life. His life. Not the lives of the people he was paid to represent.
he did try to sustain himself by absorbing the soul of another senator who conveniently died at the same time.
1942 bc.
undead.
Schrodinger’s senator
he probably dint pay his necromancer enough.
They are getting the same representation either way I suspect
