Fetterman also once asked the Israeli ambassador to send him talking points to include in a pro-Israel op-ed.
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Fetterman skips paralyzed veterans to boost Israel on Fox, triggers party revolt to remove him.
As it ran on the front
Here's the sequence, laid out in the order the wire ran it, because the order is the whole story. Paralyzed veterans had an event. Fetterman was supposed to be part of it. He wasn't — he went on Fox to advocate for Israel instead, and that's not opinion, that's the scheduling record the reporting lays out. Days later, the report surfaces, and the same week his own party is reportedly in open revolt, sourced quotes calling it a "disgrace," pressure building to oust him from the caucus. That's not two things happening near each other. That's cause, then effect, in the order the sources filed it.
What gets you at the bar isn't that a senator has opinions on foreign policy — every one of them does, that's the job. What gets you is the choice of what got bumped for what. Paralyzed veterans — people who cannot easily reschedule their own calendars around a senator's TV hit — got the no-show. Fox got the guest. And the currency here isn't campaign cash, it's airtime, which is its own kind of donor money in this town: you spend your Tuesday on the thing that gets you booked again, not the thing that got you elected.…
…(cont) Now the party wants him out, and fine, hold the line on that if you want, but ask yourself what actually triggered the revolt. It wasn't the Israel advocacy — plenty of the same caucus does that same advocacy on the same network without a mutiny forming. It was getting caught standing up the veterans to do it, on the record, in a way a wire reporter could source and print. The outrage is real. The trigger for the outrage is the stiffing, not the position. That's worth sitting with, because the next senator who wants to skip paralyzed veterans for a cable hit now knows exactly what part gets you in trouble — not the hit, the visible no-show. Fix the visibility problem, not the priorities, and you get the same calendar back next quarter, with better advance work.
“Watch the calendar, not the speech — the calendar tells you who actually matters to him. Paralyzed veterans got bumped for a cable hit, and the only thing his own party is mad about is that it got printed. That's the tell: the position was always fine with them, the visibility wasn't.”
“Every senator makes tough scheduling calls, and standing with an ally under fire is exactly the kind of leadership voters say they want — wait, is that the line I'm running for skipping veterans? Let me restate: the senator's commitment to both veterans and foreign policy is well documented, and any suggestion otherwise is a scheduling footnote being blown up by his own party for reasons that have nothing to do with veterans.”
The receipts
Sen. Jon Fetterman's leaked texts reveal he dismissed meetings with Children's Hospital of Philadelphia over Medicaid cuts and skipped a police funeral.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.