I’ve seen people on this website circulate provably false things about the Mitch McConnell situation and the fact of the matter is that we don’t know his current status and won’t know until his staff or family releases some actual information.
I’ve seen people circulating the conspiracy theory that his wife left to China to avoid taking him off life support or whatever when she was already in China two days before he was hospitalized and has since returned to the states to be with him. Like y’all aren’t fact checking anything and are just taking tweets at face value.
Genuine question: are there any sources of factual information? Because all the state-controlled media is just the usual "there is no comatose or possibly dead senator in Ba Sing Se :)" and the administration is clearly just happy we're not talking about the Epstein files at the moment.
I think part of the reason the rumor mill is working overtime here is because credible sources of news are so thin on the ground. Which is highlighting a bigger problem about US politics right now: it's difficult or even impossible trying to get your hands on any actual news. Because this administration doesn't put out statements or information; its only concern is PR.
And it's far worse PR to just let the ominous silence about the issue stretch on and on for weeks than it would be to actually show us whatever state he's currently in.
This is an administration that has no problem putting people in front of the camera when they are clearly in no shape to be doing anything other than convalescing. Trump is literally decomposing, and they're still perfectly happy to let him stagger around in front of the cameras.
So the only conclusion I can reach is that if McConnell was even aware enough to blink yes or no from a hospital bed, they'd have shown that by now.
This is what CNN says and its seriously so weird
An independent journalist published an audio of the paramedics responding to the situation. They were responding to a unconscious person in cardiac arrest and the audio indicates they performed CPR
This is what Red Cross says about CPR plus NPR article talking about CPR survival rate (trigger warning for disturbing details about patients deaths in the NPR article)
The odds of a person being restored to life after CPR is 7.6% as per NPR and cardiac arrest is 90% fatal according to Red Cross. Additionally McConnell was very old and frail. NPR says chances are much more dismal for older patients as CPR can be brutal on the body for an older patient
Chances are even lower if McConnell didn't start receiving CPR until paramedics arrived, every minute the brain is deprived of oxygen the situation worsens
People witnessing the ambulance taking McConnell away said the paramedics didn't seem to be acting very urgently which they thought was strange. The sirens were not on when the ambulance left. All of this from CNN article
Assuming the audio of the paramedics is real -- news media seems to treat it as reliable -- it would be highly unusual if McConnell wasn't either dead or incapacitated
Like it's the evidence of the situation vs. what a bunch of politicians are claiming without evidence. It seems crazy to lie about something like that! But we know that politicians lie.
The independent journalist in question has a name, Desiree Townsend. It would have taken five extra seconds to credit her for her work.
That said, as a former journalist, scanner traffic is infamously unreliable. Journalists should NOT be using scanner audio as a source unless they have something else to back it up (for example, I used to report on local house fires; there have been multiple times where I’d go out to a reported fire and it turned out to be nothing/highly exaggerated).
The scanner audio itself seems real enough (and both big and small outlets should have the tools to double check this), but until there’s independent confirmation of the facts, I’m not treating a single word of it as true.
Last I checked, Townsend was literally at the hospital awaiting updates. Unless the family or his office decide to release information, or he’s declared dead and his death becomes a public record, there’s not a lot journalists of any stripe can do beyond that.
Huh.
