Cynical me bets that he didn’t have the pneumonia when he was loaded into the ambulance, nor when he was unloaded at the hospital.
(Both my parents got pneumonia while each was in the hospital for something else. They then died fairly shortly thereafter, and pneumonia is on the death certificates as contributing.)
He’s holding a newspaper so we could check that for verification although I am 100% certain that is trivial to fake with AI. But that leaves traces too.
I’m seeing claims that the newspaper on his knee is recent (which is likely why they put it there).
So he fell on June 14 and was hospitalized. Why the big secrecy?
Welp .., then the question remains: Why not be really open from the get go about how McConnell has been doing? If at no point was he in a health crisis (well, at least once he was stabilized), then what? Secrecy for secrecy’s sake? Secrecy as the default stance?
Yet another update: I posted the link in my earlier post on Facebook, and am getting walloped by people saying “Fake news!” or “Did you know this picture first appeared in March?”
Sorry if I didn’t dive deep enough.
I have doubts. That article was from CNN, not FOX. These weird conspiracy theories are getting out of hand.
Appeared in March? I know Facebook is 95% chaff … but are the people posting that expecting that the claim will simply be taken on faith? Any evidence proffered?
And my original link there was from a local TV station.
Here is a close up of the paper that was posted in the Death Pool thread:
The logo on the baseball hat is f’ed up and the story isn’t in English or Spanish…
The news source doesnt want to give free ad time for another news organ.
In addition to the statement, McConnell released a photo of himself with his wife holding what appeared to be Sunday’s Washington Post newspaper
The statement included a smiling picture of McConnell with his wife, Elaine Chao, a tacit response to speculation online that he had died or was incapacitated. McConnell held a copy of Saturday’s Washington Post sports section in his hand.
Check out the link for the picture.
Can we stop with the conspiracy theories now?
Next it will be claims that Mitch is a secret reptile man.
I have been trying to find an original copy of the image that has that much clarity. Is it possible that image was put through AI to “sharpen it up” and that’s why it looks so strange? Every version of the original I can find is very pixelated at the scale represented by that “obvious AI rendering” version.
So all the CTs were wrong, but they could have saved us all a lot of time if they had just been upfront about it. Old men fall and knock themselves out all the time. Why not be open?
I confess that “AI” was my first thought, and when I looked at the headline on the newspaper he was holding, I was like, “What the everloving fuck?”
But compared to the actual front page, the general letter shape looks right. Pixelation seems the likeliest culprit to me.
Edit: amusingly, the top thread on the “Is this AI” subreddit right now is about this picture:
I can’t believe that conspiracy theories are still circulating, even here!
My conjecture about “why the secrecy” is just that the man is old, had a serious fall, and then developed pneumonia, so he was at risk the whole time he was in the hospital and the outcome was uncertain. They don’t keep people in the hospital for no good reason. I assume he was just recently moved to rehab once fully stabilized, and the news release coincided with that.
I don’t trust either Mitch or his fellow Republican criminals as far as I could throw them, but I don’t see anything underhanded going on here. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
It took nearly a month to prepare him for a photo that didn’t make him look like he had one foot in the grave.
Yeah, the image was apparently just downgraded to web resolution or overcompressed when saving or shot at potato quality to begin with. Which I see a lot more than expected from people’s media teams TBH.
But really come on you malfunctioning putzes, what took a damn month to provide a proper reassurance to your constituents? Jeez, we KNOW he’s old and frail.
Secrecy as a distraction?
They did, why wouldn’t they expect other people to.
Doesn’t look right to me at all. The text under the headline is clearly different. The paragraphs aren’t even the same length.
Just as an example, look at the number of lines in the second paragraph, 3 in the original, 6 in the AI version.
Why is he wearing street clothes(look at his pants) in the hospital?
ETA: If this is supposed to be proof of life, why isn’t he displaying the newspaper more prominently?
Getting dressed before he leaves?