We now have solemn talking heads interviewing carefully selected experts about whether John Fetterman is capable of performing as a U.S. senator. (This, in a Congress that now includes recovering stroke victims and a handful of senators with outright dementia.)

I haven't seen any comparable analysis of Herschel Walker, but okay. Because a decision has been made that it's all about the horse race, and not Walker's obvious impairment.

Processing disorders like Fetterman's are extremely common. In fact, there's a prominent and highly competent world leader who has one: Joe Biden. Stutterers process speech and hearing slightly differently than people who don't stutter.

But just look at all the ignorant people who try to equate it with stupidity.

You know who else has these issues? Me. I'm one of an estimated six million Americans with long covid. A former copy editor, I now have to constantly rewrite my work and miss typos that I never would before. It's frustrating. But am I stupid? Incompetent? Incapable of high-level thinking? Of course not. I have a noticable reduction in the ability to think as quickly as I did, but I'm not incapable of doing my job. It's just more difficult. Pulling from my short-term memory now takes me a minute instead of seconds. (I know people with long covid who are much, much worse.)

One of my closest friends has a brain injury, and still has processing quirks 20 years after a serious car accident. She fought back to rehabilitate herself because she found the standard rehab protocols so inadequate. After all this time, she has trouble listening over the phone if there's any noise in the background. If placed in the sightline of a ceiling fan, it can trigger a mini-seizure. (Which led to some interesting restaurant experiences.)

And she's still one of the sharpest people I know.

For the corporate media to make this election about John Fetterman's recovery instead of Oz Mehmet's plan to privatize Medicare is just journalistic malpractice -- especially since most of us probably know at least one person who needs some kind of assistance to function. To falsely smear John Fetterman as incapable because of it isn't just ableist. It's un-American.

This is a nation where we should respect people who bounce back after adversity, whatever the cause.