I hate that I have to write this. I hate every fucking second of it.

I don’t have the tools, emotionally or intellectually, to deal with a world where things like video and photography are not, in any way, helpful in determining what is real or not. Combine that with a political apparatus that is primed to lie at every given opportunity regardless of whether lying makes any sense and I exist in a world where a former Speaker of the House just released a photo and a statement to prove he was still alive and I still have legitimately no idea whether he is still alive or not.

Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I have opinions, I suppose. I have no rational basis for those opinions, unfortunately. No actual evidence. Just … fucking vibes, I guess, and I don’t really want to live in a world like that.

So, just in case you’ve been under a rock or you’re reading this in 2032, Mitch McConnell went into the hospital in early June and completely vanished from the public eye. It is July 14, as I’m writing this, and he just resurfaced yesterday (Christ, was that only yesterday??) with a statement and a picture where he is rather conspicuously sitting with a copy of the sports section of yesterday’s Washington Post.

The statement has literally no value at all in determining reality. Statements from politicians are routinely written by staff members and are just as likely to contain lies as anything else they say. It’s genuinely meaningless. It also doesn’t really match up with what we’d already learned, or at least thought we had– weren’t there recordings of the 911 dispatch? Reports that they’d administered CPR to someone on site? Any real explanation of why they waited a month to give the public any information at all about McConnell’s condition other than “he’s fine”? Even if he’s completely telling the truth, and wrote the whole statement, pneumonia in someone that elderly is not trivial. That’s not “doing fine,” and hospital-induced pneumonia tends to be a lot harder to eradicate than other kinds.

(Remember Herman Cain? He was doing fine too, until he was dead.)

No, even if the statement is real, it’s wildly insufficient, and part of the problem is that now I want to know more about where the 911 information came from, because if that was made up, we still have a large problem.

And then there’s the picture.

Now, to be clear, I think a lot of complaints about the picture, most of which have been uttered with the entire chest of the utterer, are bullshit. To wit:

“Why is he in street clothes? Why isn’t he hooked up to an IV?” He literally said in the statement he was in rehab. You get to wear regular clothes in rehab.

“Where’s the fingernail on the middle finger of his right hand?” Probably attached to the third knuckle of his finger, which is curled underneath his hand.

“His wife’s in China!” You sure about that? Show me where you have access to her schedule. I have no idea whether any part of the story about her “fleeing” to China three days after he went into the hospital is true or not, for the record, and I wouldn’t know how to look up any part of it if I wanted to look into it.

“The Washington Post doesn’t even have a sports section any more!” Yes the fuck they do. I genuinely saw someone alleging that, along with several claims that it was from some other date, or a different newspaper.

“The pillow is floating in the air behind him!” You can literally see part of the chair behind the pillow, idiot. Top left corner, level with his mouth.

The one complaint I’ve seen that makes sense to me is that he looks healthier in that picture than he has in months, and honestly I can’t argue with that one. There have also been some people pointing out that his hair looks less white than it has lately, which I also can’t dispute. But one way or another a still photo is not enough to dispel a month of complete absence from the public eye that only ended when another Republican senator died. I’ve seen this guy go to la-la land on camera enough times that as far as I know somebody’s waving a stuffed unicorn around behind the camera and they got a smile out of him. It’s simply not enough evidence, which disgusts me.

And of course, with all that comes tons and tons of different versions of the photo that we know have been faked with varying degrees of obviousness and varying levels of intent. Some of them are clearly people clowning; other people appear to be faking the picture better, like a few that I’ve seen that have added some hallucinating AI text into the newspaper. There’s a whole rant here about how people will yell “IT’S AI” at literally anything nowadays; it’s rapidly becoming a phrase that very well might not mean anything more than “I don’t like that.” There is lots of talk that the photo matches one that his staff released in 2023, just with the newspaper changed, but I’ve not seen any sourcing to that claim, nor could I really believe it if I did.

What’s the solution? In the short term, I want a Goddamned press conference, or at least an interview recorded on video. He doesn’t have to put on a suit and parade out behind a podium. Drop a laptop in front of him and have a few reporters ask him some questions over Zoom, I don’t care. And of course that would be something that could be faked too, so pick a couple of reporters with decent reputations. I don’t need hard-hitting questions. Thirty seconds of the fucker telling us what happened in such a way that makes me think he’s alive and he’s mentally capable of doing his job. A whole lot of people won’t believe it anyway, but I think it’d be good enough for me, and right now this photo isn’t enough.

And we need to put an age cap on Congress, too. Not term limits. An age cap. You shouldn’t be allowed to pass laws that fuck up a future you won’t be alive to see. But that’s a whole different post.