Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., returned to the Senate this month after an extended period of time away as she reportedly recovered from shingles. But the American public is more concerned about whether the 89-year-old, who’s the oldest member of the Senate, has lost the cognitive ability she needs to do to represent her state. Jim Newell of Slate reported that when another reporter asked Feinstein about her long absence, she responded, “No, I haven’t been gone. You should follow the — I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working.”
Conservatives are making dishonest comparisons between Feinstein and Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who had a stroke during his 2022 campaign for the position.
At the same time, conservatives are making dishonest comparisons between Feinstein and 53-year-old Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who had a stroke during his 2022 campaign for the position and took time away this year to undergo treatment for depression. Fetterman has used closed-captioning to understand what people are saying. Occasionally, he stumbles over words or mushes words together. He said the ridicule he got after his debate performance with Republican Mehmet Oz contributed to his depression.
Drew Holden in The Washington Free Beacon said the press was being hypocritical by intensely covering Feinstein’s decline but not calling into question Fetterman’s ability to do the job. Donald Trump Jr. has called him a “vegetable.” In the National Review, Noah Rothman, who has written columns for MSNBC, compared Fetterman’s stumbles as he recently questioned a Silicon Valley Bank CEO to Feinstein’s memory lapses and pointed out how Democrats mocked the nonsensical ramblings of Herschel Walker, the former football player and Republican who ran a failed campaign to represent Georgia in the Senate.
Conservatives likening Fetterman to Feinstein are making it clear that they fundamentally misunderstand what disability and accommodations mean, which is unsurprising given…
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