Our mind viruses: an example of dichotomous partisanship, ... whichever side

Dismissing evidence that a politician might be unfit for office is as much a mistake for the right as it was for the left.

Excerpt: "Remember the days after President Joe Biden’s barely coherent debate performance, when Democratic dead-enders insisted that nothing was the matter? That was embarrassing. But apparently it wasn’t so embarrassing that everybody took away the correct lesson, because something similar is now happening between Senator John Fetterman and a coterie of admirers on the right. Conservatives are now doing the exact same thing that the Biden defenders did: denying the obvious unfitness of a politician because he’s politically useful.

Fetterman is the subject of a devastating new profile in New York magazine (my former employer). Ben Terris reports that Fetterman’s staff and even his wife have repeatedly expressed concerns over his mental health, following a pattern of strange statements and actions from the senator, including a near-fatal car crash.

After Terris’s story appeared, conservatives leaped to Fetterman’s defense, depicting it as a hit piece motivated by anger at the senator’s recent rightward tilt, which has manifested in an ultra-hawkish defense of Israel, warm words for President Donald Trump, and a vote to confirm Pam Bondi as attorney general. “Fetterman was indispensable in 2022. He was reliably liberal and therefore could never be seen as going rogue.

But now that it’s actually happening, suddenly the party has deemed him quite expendable, hence the flimsy New York magazine piece that just came out of nowhere,” the conservative Washington Examiner charges. This line of attack has been repeated in columns in the The Daily Wire (“As Fetterman Defends Israel, Dems Suddenly Question His Mental Health”), National Review(“Progressives Warn That John Fetterman Suffers From Acute Pro-Israel-itis”), and several other outlets.

None of these articles acknowledges, let alone attempts to rebut, Terris’s extensive account of Fetterman’s erratic behavior, which is at least as clear as the evidence of Biden’s infirmity. Many of the conservative attacks conflate the effects of Fetterman’s stroke, which occurred before the 2022 election, with his hospitalization for depression the following year, questioning how Democrats could vouch for Fetterman in 2022 while doubting his fitness today."