Fetterman warns of party's 'socialism problem,' gets called a lazy trust-fund baby who skipped veterans for TV.

…(cont) Here's where I go back to something I actually understand, which is my car. I've got the E-ZPass transponder stuck to the windshield, and it doesn't care one bit what I tell my wife I was doing on a Tuesday afternoon — it reports where the car actually was. A United States senator's schedule works the same way, near as Nicky explains it: staff keeps it, it gets filed, it doesn't erase itself because a camera crew turned out to be more interesting that day. Is a senator's calendar less of a record than my toll receipts? Nicky didn't think so, and he's the one studying this for a living, not me.

Around that same stretch of days, the senator was out telling reporters the Democratic Party has what he called a "socialism problem," and he named the candidates he meant — one running in Michigan, one who'd already dropped out in Maine. Did that come in the same stretch of days as the meeting with veterans that didn't happen? I've just got the two items, same stretch of days, both on the record.

Congressman Deluzio, who served in Iraq himself, called the whole thing "a failure of leadership" — his exact words, I read them twice, because Nicky tells me a quote is only as good as getting it exact. Is "a failure of leadership" the phrase Deluzio used, on the record, about a sitting senator in his own party? It is.

Then Congressman Boyle put his name on a post calling the senator "a lazy trust fund baby." Not "some say." Not "critics claim." His name, his account, that phrase, out loud. Did a sitting member of the Pennsylvania delegation call a sitting senator from his own state lazy, in public, over this? He did. Did anything in what I read say he walked it back afterward? No.

And now there's a congressman from the senator's own state saying out loud he's thinking about running against him in 2028. Did that talk start before the reporting about the missed meetings, or after? After, is what I read.

Nicky's coming by Sunday to help me haul the porch furniture into the garage before the weather turns. I told him I'd have more questions for him about what counts as a record and what doesn't.

Oh — hang on, before you go. If the meeting was on the calendar and the television appearance happened in that same window, which one was the senator's actual job that Tuesday?