Tag Archives: The Independent

Is There Anyone Who’s *Not* Trolling Mehmet Oz Right Now?

by doctorads

Well the Doc opened up the old mailbag today and here’s what poured out.

Dear Dr. Ads,

There I was, minding my own business and tooling around Twitter, when I came across this tweet from longtime NBC journalist Josh Mankiewicz.

Dr. Oz . . . Wizard of Oz . . . Wizard of Lies . . . what’s going on here, Doc?

– Blizzard of Oz

Dear Blizzard,

Yeah, it’s a lot to take in, all this Ozifying.

Start with the viral video Mankiewicz tweeted, which comes from the troll factory Meidas Touch, an outfit that’s all the rage these days.

If that’s the shot, #WizardOfLies is the chaser.

Not everyone, however, thinks Meidas Touch is golden, as Rolling Stone’s Seth Hettena reported last year.

The group spent more than $1 million on an advertising strategy that it calls revolutionary but campaign veterans and independent experts say is nonsensical and a more effective tool for fundraising than for helping Democrats win elections. And despite its promised transparency, MeidasTouch’s financial structure makes a dollar-for-dollar accounting of its spending impossible — and, according to a former Federal Election Commission attorney, raises some of the same legal issues that got the Trump campaign into trouble in 2020.

Regardless, the group is having a moment right now.

As is Pennsylvania Lt. Governor/Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman, whose campaign against Mr. Oz seems entirely dedicated to trolling the celebrity carpetbagger.

Exhibit A: This video from “Jersey Shore hot mess” Snooki, who assures Oz that the Garden State loves him and he’ll be back there soon.

Exhibit B: This piece in The Independent by Abe Asher.

Senate candidate John Fetterman trolls Dr Oz by trying to get him inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame

John Fetterman is again taking aim at his Pennsylvania Senate rival Mehmet Oz over Mr Oz’s longstanding ties to neighbouring New Jersey.

On Thurdsay, Mr Fetterman launched a petition asking that Mr Oz be inducted into the New Jersey State Hall of Fame — noting that Mr Oz spoke at the hall’s induction ceremony in 2019 and hoped to join the ranks of its honourees one day.

“We all know that Dr Oz is so proud of being Jersey Strong,” Mr Fetterman said in an accompanying video. “He’s a huge New Jersey celebrity who’s lived there for three decades. Clearly he loves his home state. To honor Dr Oz’s deep New Jersey roots, we thought it would be a great idea to start a petition and help him reach his dream.of being inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.”
Oz is doing his best to troll back, as J.D. Prose reported at Penn Live.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz is taking the gloves off when it comes to his opponent’s absence on the campaign trail.

Oz has unleashed a new line of attack on Democrat John Fetterman for laying low following his medical crisis after remaining silent on the situation for several weeks.

Oz’s campaign on Tuesday unveiled the daily “John Fetterman Basement Tracker” to monitor the days Fetterman “has hid in his basement,” according to a campaign press release.

And here it is.

Not bad, but in the end, Oz is no Snooki.

Why Is Madison Cawthorn (R-Sex & Drugs) So Panicked About Reelection?

by doctorads

Well the Doc opened up the old mailbag today and here’s what poured out.

Dear Dr. Ads,

There I was, minding my own business and prowling my Twitter feed, when I stumbled upon this tweet from North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn.

Hey, Doc – isn’t this the same guy who fabricated stories about cocaine-fueled congressional orgies, then totally walked them back? Guess he can be stopped in some cases, yeah?

– Kinda Cawthorny

Dear Kinda,

Lately, everything Madison Cawthorn’s done has gone over like the metric system.

Start with his recent revelations about drugs and sex among Grand Old Party Animals, as Gustaf Kilander reported in The Independent,

Mr Cawthorn told the Warrior Poet Society podcast that “the sexual perversion that goes on in Washington… I look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life”.

“I’ve always paid attention to politics, all of a sudden you get invited to like, ‘well hey, we’re gonna have a kind of sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come!’ And you realise they’re asking you to come to an orgy,” he said.

“You know, some of the people leading the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and they watch them doing, you know, a key bump of cocaine right in front of you,” he added.

That led to a come-to-Jesus meeting with the reigning Grand Old Poobahs, as The Independent piece noted.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise met with Mr Cawthorn on Wednesday. While Mr Cawthorn, 26, refused to answer questions from reporters after the meeting, Mr McCarthy, 57, said “he’s lost my trust is gonna have to earn it back. And I laid out everything that I find is unbecoming”.

“This is unacceptable. There’s no evidence to this. He changes what he [says] and that’s not becoming of a Congressman…He did not tell the truth,” he added, alleging that Mr Cawthorn changed his story when confronted by members of Republican House leadership.

But that wasn’t the only change occasioned by Cawthorn’s moonwalk, according to this CNN report by Melanie Zanona, Manu Raju and Alex Rogers .

‘He’s an embarrassment’: Republicans threaten to primary Cawthorn over controversial antics

For those of you keeping score at home, the Republican Accountability Project contributed this head-spinning cameo from the always unreliable Roger Stone.

The next day Cawthorn himself hit back by blaming the usual suspects, as Politico’s Olivia Beavers and Craig Howie reported.

Cawthorn blames ‘the left and the media’ after intra-GOP furor over sex-and-drugs comments

Amid a burgeoning congressional controversy, Rep. Madison Cawthorn on Friday blamed Democrats and the media for amplifying his comments that some of his fellow GOP members engage in orgies and use cocaine.

“My comments on a recent podcast appearance calling out corruption have been used by the left and the media to disparage my Republican colleagues and falsely insinuate their involvement in illicit activities,” Cawthorn said in a statement without addressing the substance of his own comments directly.

“The left and the media want to use my words to divide the GOP. … I will not back down to the mob, and I will not let them win.”

“Falsely insinuate their involvement in illicit activities”? Let’s revisit the transcript, shall we?

The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington… I look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life.

I’ve always paid attention to politics, all of a sudden you get invited to like, ‘well hey, we’re gonna have a kind of sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come!’ And you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy,

You know, some of the people leading the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and they watch them doing, you know, a key bump of cocaine right in front of you.

All that mishegas, however, is small potatoes compared to Cawthorn’s real problem, which the Daily Beast’s Sam Brodey recently detailed.

Madison Cawthorn Committed the One Unforgivable Sin of Politics

The ingredients are there for an upset.

If the worst thing Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) did this month was call Ukraine’s President “a thug,” or get caught speeding multiple times with a revoked license, or accuse Speaker Nancy Pelosi of being an alcoholic, the 26-year-old MAGA-influencer would probably be just fine in his re-election bid.

But Cawthorn did something far worse, at least for his own political prospects, and it may cost him his seat: He left his constituents—and then was forced to return to them, hat in hand, after the courts predictably struck down the state’s new map, and eliminated the district he left to run in, on Feb. 23.

After Cawthorn abandoned his congressional district to run in a newly drawn more conservative one, as Brodey’s piece noted, “a state court undid the lines that prompted Cawthorn to make his big play, and the district he had moved to vanished in an instant.”

That “district-switching screw-up” could in turn screw Cawthorn.

The Doc’s diagnosis: This guy’s political career is one false step away from the medical examiner’s table.