Fetterman made Voltaire’s prayer: “O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous”


My fellow Americans, you’ve probably already seen some of the mocking commentary on a Dr Oz campaign ad, in which he goes shopping for crudité in a Pennsylvania grocery store. He was a bit out of touch. How out of touch? Well, I haven’t lived in Pennsylvania for 22 years, and even I know there isn’t a “Wegner’s” there, it’s “Wegman’s”. And then the way he stands there and grabs at a few things in reach…Oz hasn’t been grocery shopping in ages, and it shows.

The real question, though, is John Fetterman’s reply to this rich man going shopping for the first time ever effective campaigning? You bet it is.

The amount of money it takes to run for office is unreal, but it helps when your opponent is so flamingly incompetent.

In other fun Oz smackdowns, the Republican party is cutting its losses and spending less money in Pennsylvania. That’s gotta sting, and it’s also going to have down-ballot effects. Watching Republicans screw up is wonderfully entertaining.

And then, Oz was asked how many houses he owns, which is the kind of question no one ever asks me (my answer would be one, sort of, since we still owe the bank on it). Oz stammered out an answer of two, but he was more concerned with qualifying it and hedging his numbers. The Daily Beast counted for him. It’s TEN. Ten houses.

• a 9,000-square-foot mansion in New Jersey

• a 7,000-square-foot country house in Pennsylvania

• a condo in New Jersey

• a piece of residential real estate in Sariyer, Turkey

• another piece of residential real estate in Sariyer, Turkey

• a Manhattan condo

• another Manhattan condo

• an oceanside mansion in Palm Beach, Florida

• a cattle farm in Okeechobee, Florida

• and a piece of residential property in Konya, Turkey, which appears to be used as a student dormitory

Each one is probably worth far more than my house. He could probably pay off my mortgage for me with a fraction of his monthly pay-out for houses.

This is a good question to ask any big wig politician of either party. You know, I’m going to be generous and suggest that three is not an unreasonable number, since they’re rich: a real home in their home state, plus a residence near the capitol, and what the heck, I’ll throw in a vacation home somewhere nice. Anything beyond that, you’re just pigging out at the trough.

While we’re at it, another sin of the revoltingly wealthy is investing in the stock market. You should be required to divest.

Comments

  1. says

    Give the guy a break on the houses. He was off by less than an order of magnitude.

    Yeah! On a logarithmic scale (base 10) he was only off by 0.7.

  2. Oggie: Mathom says

    I know some hard-core Trumpists. They are laughing their asses off at Oz. Of course, they will still vote for him because, y’know, he’s not a commie-NAZI socialist out to take all of our guns away and make us turn gay and restrict our access to medical care and destroy the environment by requiring solar panels and take away our pickup trucks and make us drive Priuseseseses and make Obama dictator for life with Hillary in charge of the CIA and FBI and FCC and NSA and take away our steaks and ribs and yadda-yadda-yadda blay-blah-blah.

    Now if Oz really wanted to play to his base, he would have picked up a package of organic ribeye steaks and noted they are up close to $20.00 a pound. After all, only Democrats eat veggies.

  3. FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) says

    Oggie!

    Good to see you here. I hope you’re doing well.

  4. Reginald Selkirk says

    Crudite is a word I have seen in print more than heard in conversation, so that I am not entirely sure of its pronunciation.

  5. brightmoon says

    Wegmsns response is brilliant. And that plate looked delicious. I like veggies ,almost never call them crudités

  6. says

    Crudite is pronounced croo-dee-tay. It’s a French term after all. And a chef term, because how are you gonna sound hip if you call a plate of veggies finger food?

  7. says

    Here’s his excuse:

    “I was exhausted…I’ve gotten my kids’ names wrong as well. I don’t think that’s a measure of someone’s ability to lead the Commonwealth”

    So, in addition to everything else that’s wrong about him, he doesn’t actually know what a U.S. Senator does.

  8. Reginald Selkirk says

    I found a source that says the video was posted in April – which at least gets him off the hook for buying asparagus out of season.

  9. Reginald Selkirk says

    @12: No, but he likes the sound of the word “Commonwealth” – especially the lasts syllable.

  10. HidariMak says

    It’s nice to see these sorts of Republicans stumble around like the clueless idiots they are when trying to associate with “the common public”. But Democrats not playing like they’re 10 points behind, is how Republicans got people like Trump into the White House. It has been a while since being clueless and out of touch acted as much of a deterrent for Republican voters.

  11. Reginald Selkirk says

    Wegner’s is, in fact, a grocery store that does not exist. He has seemingly conflated the names of two Pennsylvania supermarkets, Redner’s and Wegmans—spoken like a true man of the people who has perhaps only seen these names blur past him as he rides in the back seat of a luxury vehicle.
    Twitter quickly determined Oz was at Redner’s…

    source

  12. raven says

    With ten expensive houses, he must be paying a fortune in property taxes.

    He is probably paying more in property taxes than a well off middle class American makes in a year.

    What is Dr Oz annual salary?
    Dr Mehmet Oz Net Worth
    Net Worth: $100 Million
    Salary: $20 Million
    Date of Birth: Jun 11, 1960 (62 years old)
    Gender: Male
    Height: 6 ft (1.85 m)
    2 more rows

    Dr Mehmet Oz Net Worth https://www.celebritynetworth.com › richest-businessme

    This explains it.
    He is worth $100 million and makes $20 million a year.

    I suppose his big property tax bills don’t matter much compared to his income.

  13. says

    Not sure which is worse: this bit of fake-ass populism, or Paul Ryan and his family in 2012 walking uninvited into a soup kitchen and pretending to clean food-prep trays that were already clean.

  14. Oggie: Mathom says

    But Democrats not playing like they’re 10 points behind, is how Republicans got people like Trump into the White House.

    Fetterman’s campaign is treating Oz’s campaign as if it is a joke. Fetterman has managed to run a positive campaign (here’s what I stand for, here’s how it help the people of PA) while treating Oz as if he were a third-party candidate campaigning on a froot-loop platform. And it is working.

  15. Owlmirror says

    It can be easily seen that Wegner’s (@grocerieswegner) is a parody account created this month. Probably by someone on Fetterman’s team.

    Pretty good design, i have to say.

  16. StevoR says

    @3. Marcus Ranum : Turkey? That’s not in ‘murrica, is it?

    Well there’s a Palestine in Texas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine,_Texas ) and a Syracuse (as in Sicilies capital & former city-state) and a whole lot of Memphises over in the States :

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis

    Does anyone recall the original Egyptian one? So .. lessee :

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_(disambiguation)

    Yup, there is indeed several Turkey’s in the USA notably a city in Texas and a town in North Carolina plus Turkey Mountains (sounds yum!) in New York and Oaklahoma and a numberof Turkey rivers likely mostly named for the avian dinosaur rather than the nation.

    Apparently, I vaguely recall reading somewhere, the nation or its govt or people wants us to change how we spell its name or something?

    Exactly which Turkey Oz (Hey, that’s MY countries name – kinda!) jhas his tenth house in I dunno.

  17. StevoR says

    PS. Seconding #5.FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) in being glad to see Oggie back and wishing him well.

  18. Akira MacKenzie says

    Now if Oz really wanted to play to his base…

    I used to be that Oz’s base would have likely been Tofu-slurping, crystal-gazing, free-trade-green-coffee bean enema using natural green mommies and other wannabe hippies. Since the pandemic, though it seems the right has also embraced anti-medicine snake oil as evidenced by their sudden turn against vaccines and fascist grifters like Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro* hawking “supplements.”

    *Wait, isn’t Shapiro’s wife a doctor? She could tell him that a “WAP” is symptom of a disease, but that FORCE MAXIUMUM TESTO PLUS 90000 was nothing but chalk dust and powered lead?

  19. consciousness razor says

    Akira MacKenzie, #26:

    I used to be that Oz’s base would have likely been Tofu-slurping, crystal-gazing, free-trade-green-coffee bean enema using natural green mommies and other wannabe hippies.

    Other than maybe the “fair trade” part (about which they’re ambivalent, not hostile), that does sound an awful lot like it could be a (somewhat more affluent) conservative who spends their time watching trash on daytime TV … his audience, in other words. There are of course some others, who are different because they mark the bubble next to a conservative Dem when they’re in a voting booth. He’d like to get a lot of their votes too and will definitely get some, just probably not too many.

    Since the pandemic, though it seems the right has also embraced anti-medicine snake oil

    It’s never really been a left/right type of thing. Plenty of conservatives have also been duped, by every quack and huckster since the dawn of time. And you could for instance go back to the founding of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, formerly the Office of Alternative Medicine (George H.W. Bush’s term, with plenty of R support in both houses by the looks of it). Or there’s a little breakdown of its history from the NIH.

    They’ve regularly increased its budget ever since. But to be fair, they probably have no idea what they’re voting for most of the time. (Just like they’ve got no clue about what’s in their snake oil, I suppose.)

  20. consciousness razor says

    Speaking of Dr. Oz and obscure government institutions, I’m reminded of how I was looking at Oz’s supposed involvement in the “President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition” (appointed and reappointed by Trump, who likes recognizing people from the TV who remind him of himself). Apparently, that involvement consisted of doing nothing at all, not even showing up for its pointless meetings by the looks of it. It was probably about as much as Herschel Walker did, who was co-chair (no, seriously).

  21. DanDare says

    Progressive Dems tried to enact unrealised capitol gains as taxable but corpratist Dems sided with the Thugs to vote it down.

  22. snarkrates says

    corporatist Dems=Kristen Sinema.

    The problem with Voltaire’s prayer is that–as the past 12 years have demonstrated so clearly–being ridiculous does not guarantee one will be defeated. And then one is ruled by the ridiculous.

  23. snarkrates says

    Actually, there has always been a lot of woo on the right as well as the left. Most of Alex Jone’s money comes from his endorsements and marketing of “supplements,” and Jim Bakker has been promoting colloidal silver for quite a while now (I keep hoping it turns him into an evil smurf, but I doubt the fucker actually gets high on his own supply).