There has been a lot made of the constant blundering of the Dr. Oz campaign for the U.S. Senate. Other than the fact that he's running for Senate in a state that he doesn't live in, the campaign has been poorly run from day one. And I could give a shit about any of that.
My rage for that motherfucker runs hotter than hot. I was visiting my mother around the time that she was first handed her cancer diagnosis. We were sitting in the dining room while she was going over all of her new medications and trying to figure out if anything she was currently taking would have an adverse reaction. Almost half of her dining room table was covered with bottles that were filled with various supplements. This presented a large problem with the calculus of the new cancer meds that she was going to have to start taking.
The first question that popped into my head was, “Who told you to take all of these pills?” Some of them were off of the suggestion of her primary care doctor and others were because she saw them on Dr. Oz's television show. My second question was me wondering out loud if any of these supplements actually helped her with whatever ailment they were supposed to alleviate. Her response ranged from not really to not at all.
This brought on the obvious question of why take all of these supplements if they weren't doing anything. From what I could put together, her doctor had a very “if they aren't hurting anything, you may as well keep taking them” approach.
Howard Zinn's Manufacturing Consent was not at the top of my mother's reading list so she did not put the media that she consumed under much scrutiny. She was from a generation that trusted radio and television personalities because they wouldn't be on the radio or television if they couldn't be trusted. To her, the fact that Dr. Oz was a doctor and was on television meant that he could be trusted.
Dr. Oz's preying on the elderly that watched daytime television is part of how he was able to become a successful television personality. He used his charisma and charm to sell my mother snake oil supplements. And for that, he can go fuck himself for all eternity with a jagged metal dildo.
I am no fan of John Fetterman's. I don't like the way that he cosplays as some sort of working class everyman and there are a lot of stories of him being ineffectual or worse as the mayor of Braddock. As Lieutenant Governor, he has done some good work on the board of pardons (with the one glaring exception in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.) This has drawn the big money ire of a few super PACs that are dumping millions of dollars in ad buys across the state to claim that Fetterman is “soft on crime.” These ads are using the same War On Drugs/mass incarceration language that would be easy to see through for anybody with a brain in their head.
The local news stations have been useless in exposing Dr. Oz. They are feckless starfuckers that won't take him to task because of their fake impartiality and both sides-ism. They want to get to talk to the celebrity doctor that had the television show for a chance at boosting ratings and don't want to lose access by pissing off his campaign.
The majority of Oz's blunders are happening in the bubble of the internet so the people that need to see that he's a fraud won't end up seeing it because they only watch local news or the Facebook algorithm won't put the information front of them. There are very online reporters that point out Oz's bullshit on a regular basis but they end up screaming into the void of their own echo chamber.
I do find it weird that someone that considers themselves to be a doctor would go after a person who recently had a stroke. Oz claimed that it wasn't him but someone that worked for the campaign that first started posting about Fetterman's stroke. Which then poses the question if he's not in control of his own messaging who will be making the decisions if he wins the election? He has clearly demonstrated an inability to take responsibility for his own actions by way of being hauled in front of Congress for shilling pills that don't do anything. And scapegoating a staffer was all bullshit anyway since his campaign has more recently gone after Fetterman's recovery like a teenager that's just discovered masturbation.
The debate over debates was as tiresome as it could possibly be. Fetterman has lingering auditory issues as a result of his stroke and asked to use a closed captioning system so he could read the questions as they are presented. Oz's campaign jumped on that to say that if Fetterman can't debate, he can't be a senator. Which, again, seems odd behavior coming from a doctor. If you're worried about having a senator that is recovering from a stroke, go take a look at the current roster of United States Senators. The bulk of them have been in office since the Paleolithic Age and trail off mid-sentence when telling stories about the price of rock candy in nineteen aught six.
It seems like a day cannot go by without some embarrassing story about the TV doctor. News broke about his fake products being tested on animals with an impressively high bodycount and it barely left the news cycle before footage came out of him speaking at a fundraiser while he was standing in front of Hitler's car.
That one was so stupid it made my brain hurt. The lack of self-awareness and optics that this new breed of Republican proudly demonstrates is astounding. If I were a piece of shit, scumbag politician purposely pushing the country toward fascism and white Christian Nationalism at breakneck speeds, I would at least try to not stand in front of Hitler's car while doing it. And I have so many questions and a baseball bat for the owner of Hitler's car that hosted this fundraiser. First of which would be, “Why the fuck do you own Hitler's car?”
All of this makes me wonder if Dr. Oz knew what he was getting into when he signed on for a vanity campaign for a Senate seat in a state he doesn't live in. Or if he even cares. He does seem to be the type of person with an obscenely large ego that is also empty and vapid so things like caring about what he's doing might not register with him.
What's worse is that I don't think a large portion of the electorate even cares that he's an empty suit with an expensive haircut. No amount of evidence pointing to the fact that Dr. Oz is a failure of a human being will sway them because of the cult/sports mentality they've adopted when it comes to our elected leaders.
I have voted in every election since I was eighteen years old and for once in my life I would like to vote for someone instead of voting against someone. I'm not voting for John Fetterman. I am voting against Mehmet Oz.
No comments:
Post a Comment