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Tag: mehmet oz
John Fetterman Flips Pennsylvania Senate Seat, Defeating Mehmet Oz

John Fetterman Flips Pennsylvania Senate Seat, Defeating Mehmet Oz

“I got knocked down but I got back up,” Pennsylvania lieutenant governor and Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman tweeted last month, referring to the stroke that took him off the campaign trail for months. Even as Fetterman fought his way back, including doing interviews with the help of closed captioning to help him adapt to a temporary auditory processing disorder, the media worked on painting him as unqualified while giving Oz a pass on things like having hundreds of dogs killed for medical research and promoting quack medicines.

Now Fetterman has gotten all the way back up, defeating Republican Mehmet Oz in the race for the Senate seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. This is a big pickup for Democrats in the fight to retain control of the Senate.

[With more than 93 percent of precincts reported, Fetterman was projected to win with just over 50 percent to 47 percent for Oz. Democrat Josh Shapiro easily defeated Republican Doug Mastriano in the Pennysylvania governor's race.]

The Party Of Sham And Chicanery Is More Trumpy Than Ever

The Party Of Sham And Chicanery Is More Trumpy Than Ever

Republicans may win or lose elections during this midterm cycle but either way, the once Grand Old Party is completing its devolution into a mirror of former President Donald Trump. The midterm elections have magnified its reflection of his deeply inauthentic and malignant character. Compulsive lying, constant expressions of hostility and cruelty, and the sheer phoniness of the Republican candidates cannot cloak the party's hollow core, whose true ideology is nihilism.

Not surprisingly, Trump is attracted to figures who resemble him, and especially to those who genuflect to him without a trace of self-respect. None of them will hold fast to any political principle because, despite professions of patriotism and piety, their only purpose is to grab for power, wealth and the weird status of being approved by Trump. Like Trump himself, they are grifters first and last.

Mehmet Oz may be the single most perfect example of this Trumpian template. Having achieved great wealth and a degree of fame if not respect on a cheesy cable TV show, and selling magic vitamins, Dr. Oz determined long ago that the medical profession's moral precepts could only hinder his advancement. Years of promoting fake cures and instant weight-loss pills fostered a deep cynicism that is the essence of the candidate we see today: a phony Pennsylvanian who actually still resides in New Jersey and eagerly asserts extreme positions on abortion, guns, health insurance and other issues that he shunned when practicing medicine. Dr. Oz is a new-fangled worshipper of Trump, but an old-fashioned faith-healing quack.

On a superficial level, Herschel Walker seems like an entirely different sort of celebrity candidate, unable to mimic the smooth patter of chameleons like Oz or J.D. Vance. But as a fraudulent personality, the former football star can compete with the worst of them. Even before Trump handpicked Walker, it was clear that Republicans no longer cared about the mental health or intellectual capacity of their candidates, or whether they have any marbles (see Coach Tommy Tuberville, the brazen racist senator from Alabama, another gridiron genius).

Walker is a perfect symbol of a party that pretends to care about sexual "morality," and yet formulates comically convoluted excuses for a man whose shady escapades led him to pressure women — who knows how many? — to terminate the pregnancies he caused, and to put a gun to the head of his ex-wife. His fantasy resume as a "successful business executive" would be Trumpian, except that Walker can't even fake it plausibly. But that doesn't seem to bother Republican stalwarts in Georgia.

If you liked Jerry Falwell Jr., the gamy subject of a Hulu TV documentary premiering this week, God Forbid, about sex antics involving his wife and the pool-boy, you'll love the ridiculously "saved" Walker and all the Trump Republicans. Falwell was the first big evangelical leader to endorse Trump in 2015, and those birds of a feather are now a flock.

As for Vance, he stands (or more precisely kneels) for an especially slavish brand of Trumpism. The author of Hillbilly Elegy is a flipping convert who despised Donald until that opinion was no longer convenient for Vance's ambition and then flopped down to lick his boots. Even Trump can't always resist mocking these spineless creatures, as when he noted during a campaign rally that the Ohio Senate nominee "is kissing my ass" after saying "lots of bad (stuff) about me." Indeed Vance said some very bad stuff, like his 2016 observation that Trump "might be a cynical asshole like Nixon or might be America's Hitler." That's all in the rearview mirror now, because Vance is a political puppet of fascist billionaire Peter Thiel, the biggest donor to the Republican Party, and Thiel sees Trumpism as the vehicle to turn American politics further and further right into dark nihilism.

Speaking of Thiel, he represents still another sort of duplicity that ought to bring shame on him and all the Republicans who grasp at his lucre. The politicians he so lavishly finances are outspokenly hostile to gay rights, including marriage equality, and are hyping a paranoid vision of gay and trans Americans as evil "groomers" who endanger children. But oddly enough, Thiel himself is quite actively gay and married to a man. How does he resolve the contradiction? If the far right he has empowered starts to persecute gays, he'll be alright with that — because he is already buying citizenship in gay-friendly Malta.

But what will all these mountebanks and moralizing imposters do for the average voter? Remember the promises Trump made in 2016, and how he violated all of them. These MAGA Republicans certainly won't reduce inflation, a worldwide problem for which they don't even propose solutions. They won't protect your children, or your retirement, or your health care, or your rights. They will assuredly cut their own taxes, slash your well-earned Social Security and Medicare, continue to plunder the planet, and laugh at every gullible American who voted for them, all the way to the bank — just like their master Trump.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Oz Floats Bizarre Plan To Force Veterans Into Private Health Insurance

Oz Floats Bizarre Plan To Force Veterans Into Private Health Insurance

Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, gave a confusing response about veterans' health care during an interview with a Pittsburgh radio station last week.

The station 90.5 WESA asked Oz about the PACT Act, which expands health care coverage for veterans exposed to toxins in the course of their service. The interview took place a few hours before recalcitrant Senate Republicans finally agreed to support the legislation.

Oz called for the bill's passage and said he believed that veterans should be enrolled in the same insurance system that members of Congress receive from the Affordable Care Act's private health insurance exchanges.

"I actually think they should get the same insurance I get if I'm serving in the U.S. Senate," Oz said. "They've done everything you could ask an American to do, and they've already paid their fee and they're not getting what's deserved of them — in this case, health care access."

"These folks risked their lives," he added.

The Department of Veterans Affairs' Veterans Health Administration provides health care coverage to U.S. military veterans and provides free treatment for all service-related injuries — a benefit exclusive to veterans' health care.

By contrast, senators receive health care coverage through the private health insurance exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

While VA hospitals have come under fire in the past for long wait times, studies have found that the public health care system is superior or equal to privately run hospitals on measures of patient satisfaction and quality of care.

Oz's apparent confusion about how the VA works is particularly glaring because he trained to become a medical doctor at Philadelphia's own VA Medical Center.

And his support for Senate health insurance is particularly odd given the changing stances he's taken on Obamacare, which set up the exchanges that senators use to receive health care.

Although Oz endorsed Obamacare in a 2010 video he appeared in for the health care advocacy group The California Endowment, his campaign recently walked back his support for President Barack Obama's signature health care law.

Brittany Yanick, a spokesperson for the Oz campaign, told CNN that he "does not support a big government takeover of the health insurance industry" and "would not have voted for Obamacare."

In a 2016 interview with Fox Business, Oz called Obamacare "a very brave effort to include more Americans in the health care system" but said that "the problem with it though is that there was compromise required to get it passed, which limited its ability to address the quality of care and more importantly the cost of care."

The Oz campaign did not return a request for comment.

Oz, who moved back to Pennsylvania in 2020 after living in New Jersey for 30 years, has tried to mold his experience as a physician and reality television star into a compelling campaign message. He claims to have "scars" from taking on the pharmaceutical industry, and his campaign website lists health care as one of the core planks of his pitch to voters.

But Oz, whose net worth is north of $100 million, is heavily invested in Big Pharma companies, according to financial disclosure documents. Those companies include Johnson & Johnson, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and PanTheryx, a biotechnology company on whose board he sits.

His campaign also took $5,800 in donations from Nostrum Pharmaceuticals Founder and President Nirmal Mulye, who quadrupled the price of an essential antibiotic — a move which he described as a "moral imperative."

"I think it is a moral requirement to make money when you can ... to sell the product for the highest price," Mulye told the Financial Times in 2018.

Former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Oz during the Republican primary, also has a checkered history on veterans' health care. In 2018, Trump signed the VA MISSION Act, which some critics say has led to worse health outcomes and more expensive care for veterans.

Oz is running against Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat, for the state's Senate seat left open by retiring Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA). A recent Fox News poll has Fetterman leading Oz 47% to 36% among registered voters.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.