A bombshell Wall Street Journal report Thursday reported on the extent to which Sen. John Fetterman is both brain-dead and lazy – so lazy, in fact, that I think we should bring back chain gangs just so he can put his ogre-esque body to work doing something … anything!

It’s hard to imagine Fetterman surviving this latest scandal, the details of which might disgust you. And that’s too bad, because it’s Labor Day, and we should all be excited for the long weekend, the last of summer.

But as you fire up the grill tomorrow, think about what kind of depraved person would schedule a meeting with paralyzed veterans and then just … ghost them. You’d have to be slimier than a slug’s mucus trail, right? Or maybe you’d have to be John Fetterman.

Among other salacious details, WSJ revealed several damning text exchanges between the Pennsylvania senator and his aides.

In one incident – which I found the most shocking – Fetterman reportedly called in sick the day he was slated to meet with three paralyzed Pennsylvania military veterans who traveled some 300 miles to the nation’s capital. He reportedly told his staff he ate something bad and had a tummy ache. Veterans sacrificed their ability to walk, but Fetterman couldn’t sacrifice an hour of his time.

Worse yet, Fetterman strolled straight back into the office after his staffers met with the veterans. Aides said he looked normal. Whatever he ate, it certainly wasn’t toxic diarrhea lettuce. He reportedly informed them he had a super, super important appointment that took precedence over Keystone veterans: a Fox News hit to talk about Israel and the Iran War.

Get 25% off for 1 year

This would be funny if it were an SNL skit or South Park bit. It’s not, though. It’s just a normal day in Fetterman’s Washington.

But disabled vets weren’t the only ones reportedly blown off because the Carhartt ogre had better things to do with his time. He dismissed representatives from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) concerned about Medicaid cuts.

“Why do I have to keep having to meet with chop,” Fetterman texted an aide, according to the WSJ.

“Because they are worried about vaccines and Medicaid cuts,” the aide replied.

“Well I’m not,” Fetterman replied, before adding, “I’m convinced they just want free trips to DC.”

Dead cops and their families got the cold shoulder, too. After a staffer provided details on upcoming funerals for three police officers, Fetterman acted like a whiny teenager who had just been told by their parents that the visit to Grandma and Grandpa’s house would take up the afternoon.

“3 hours??” Fetterman texted, according to the WSJ.

The aide said the ceremony was formal and the equivalent of three separate funerals.

“This may be a nonstarter,” he shot back, perhaps fearing he’d have to wear a suit rather than a hoodie.

Fetterman even directed his staffers to help him work as little as possible, according to WSJ. He would reportedly send a staffer into a hearing to make sure the Senate clerk noted him as present, which in some cases allowed him to leave early. For 26 out of 31 hearings for assigned committees, the clerk marked Fetterman present. In 20 of those hearings, Fetterman went mute and didn’t say a word, the WSJ reported.

I can’t think of a better metaphor for how the bipartisan political class thinks of the citizens they rule over from afar in Washington, D.C.

So, yes, maybe Fetterman should be sentenced to 6 years – a full Senate term – of manual labor, digging ditches on the side of a Pennsylvania highway in a black-and-white-striped Carhartt jumpsuit. Stroke aside, there’s clearly not much going on in his brain. But maybe as he plowed his shovel into the rocky earth, he’d feel a pang of remorse for turning his job in the Senate, a once serious body, into an utter joke.

At the very least, he should resign.

Like what you’re reading? If so, please consider subscribing to State of the Day or sharing this with a friend. We’re currently running a 25% off sale to celebrate Labor Day, so there’s no better time to join. You’d be supporting this newsletter and helping keep independent journalism alive.

Get 25% off for 1 year

Share

MORE FROM JOHN LOFTUS

In a quiet pocket of America, a small group of men preserves the history and legacy of one of our great sports and cultural pastimes: baseball.

Lewes, Delaware, is a sleepy town located on the Delaware Bay just north of the popular beach destination Rehoboth Beach. Over 3,000 people call it home. But it is also home to a baseball league of men in their 20s to 70s who play the game according to 19th-century rules.

It’s not the game we have all come to love. It’s more like stick ball, the way the game was originally played before it grew in popularity in the 20th century and developed modern rules. Fielders don’t use gloves, for example. Pitchers throw underhand. Batters are “strikers” and strictly use wooden bats. Foul balls are not strikes. Umpires do not even call balls or strikes unless a batter is not swinging at a hittable pitch.

“It’s definitely baseball. It moves faster. It’s just a bat and ball. You just get out there and play,” Mike DiPaolo, president of the Lewes Base Ball Club, told a local outlet. DiPaolo’s team played games against the Rising Sun Base Ball Club and the Elkton Eclipse Base Ball Club in August.

“I want to say it’s pure, but that sounds corny. It looks so deceptively simple,” he said.

Not only do they play by 19th-century rules, but they also dress like 19th-century players. The uniforms are baggy, with pants held up with leather belts. The caps have short, stubby brims. They all look a bit dorky, but it’s a charming dorkiness. It fills you with nostalgia.

These players are not just eccentric hobbyists. They are having fun, of course, but they are doing something incredibly important. Like historians, they are preserving the legacy of baseball, its rich history in the Maryland and Delaware region, and a bygone era when nearly every town had a baseball club and competed against each other.

The world today feels endlessly churning. The internet, social media, AI videos, entertainment, online sports gambling, prediction markets — all of these things make it seem as if we live in Year Zero. The eternal present. We are so bombarded with information, so glued to our screens at virtually all hours of the day, that we rarely take time even to acknowledge the past, let alone study it deeply. We don’t just forget the history we learned in school; we forget that there even is history.

Read more

Ben Shapiro is very good at talking. He is not so good at listening.

As the neocon Republican establishment and populist right traded shots over America’s affordability crisis – which has since been dubbed “Burritogate” – Shapiro jumped into the fray to complain about Americans worried about rising food prices.

“Current ‘common good conservative’ inflation messaging: $20 burritos are a human right but also every serious methodology for making them cheaper (i.e. kill the tariffs, break the unions, and deregulate the food supply chain) isn’t America First, so we need to complain a lot about how America is cooked and then surrender to Iran,” Shapiro said.

For a takedown of Shapiro’s argument, look no further than this definitive Burritogate inflation guide from the Daily Caller’s Will Upton.

But I want to address something else about Shapiro: his failure to understand Americans.

Shapiro seems to consistently mock those of us who are less than impressed by his piercing “logic” and surfeit of cold, hard “facts.”

Take this clip from mid-April, when Shapiro misled his audience by falsely claiming the Strait of Hormuz had been pried open by U.S. military might.

“Remember when they said we would never be able to open the strait? ... Guess what? Guess what? [Iran] opened the strait,” he said at the time. “They stopped messing around in the strait because they didn’t have the forward operating capacity. Their navy was, in fact, at the bottom of the sea.”

He was basically telling Americans skeptical of the war and the administration’s claims that Iran’s navy had been “obliterated” that they were idiots for ever asking questions in the first place.

Read more

In late April, President Trump was asked about Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. special forces soldier arrested for allegedly placing bets on the Nicolás Maduro raid using insider knowledge. Van Dyke, who “participated in the planning and execution” of the raid, wagered several bets totaling $33,034 on the prediction market platform Polymarket as to the timing of Maduro’s downfall and ended up pocketing $409,000 once the wagers hit, according to the DOJ.

The president, in typical fashion, had a blunt answer.

“Well, you know, the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino,” Trump responded. “And you look at what’s going on all over the world, in Europe and every place, they’re doing these betting things. I was never much in favor of it. I don’t like it conceptually, but it is what it is.”

“No, I think that I’m not happy with any of that stuff,” Trump continued. “But they have all these different sites. They have predictive markets. It’s a crazy world. It’s a much different world than it was.”

He’s right.

Read more