The Mitch McConnell mystery
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When and why did Mitch McConnell’s hospitalization first become public?
Mitch McConnell is 84 years old.
It's been 84 years.
That makes him older than Israel, superglue, and the microwave oven. Mitch McConnell, polio survivor, is older than the polio vaccine. And we've known for some time that he's not in peak physical form. It was back in 2023 when he took a nasty fall and was hospitalized with a fractured rib and a concussion. And it was that same year when he froze twice in front of cameras while speaking to the press. Once for like a solid 30 seconds.
We're not going to play the whole thing.
The point is, despite years of health issues, the former Senate Majority Leader still managed to mystify the nation when he ghosted on Congress and his constituents for a month. The Mitch McConnell mystery on Today Explained from Vox.
Mitch.
Today Explained.
My name is Annie Greyer, and I'm a senior reporter at CNN. When did you first hear that something was wrong with the former Senate Majority Leader? So his team actually put out a statement the day that he was hospitalized on June 14th. It was a very short statement, and all it said was, Senator McConnell was admitted to the hospital this morning. He is receiving excellent care. That short statement set off a firestorm of trying to figure out more because we learned so little from just that one sentence. Yeah, why does this become a big mystery if they were transparent about it from the jump? Because I think it's one thing to alert people that the senator's been hospitalized, but to go on for so long and not say why he was hospitalized initially or what is keeping him in the hospital just led us to continue to ask more questions because we were getting no answers.
And when you say so long, I mean, we're talking on the morning of Tuesday, July 14th. And I think we got proof of life on Sunday, July 12th. Was there almost no communication or was there actually no communication between that near month? So throughout that month, a couple of things happened. Hmm. First, there was EMS audio that came out that showed that emergency responders went to McConnell's home on June 14th and were responding to somebody who was unconscious, who needed CPR, and who was under cardiac arrest. And that really turned this story because it showed that this was a really serious situation and that was much more severe than what the simple statements that we were getting from McConnell's team were.
After that EMS audio, McConnell's team put out another statement, but again, it didn't really address the larger concerns or the questions about why he was hospitalized, why he continued to remain there. It just said that, you know, the senator was continuing to recover in the hospital. So... The mystery around all of this just continued to build, continued to build. And then I spoke to one of McConnell's neighbors who witnessed the morning of McConnell being taken to the hospital on June 14th. This person witnessed emergency responders carrying somebody out of McConnell's home on a stretcher. This person was wrapped in a blanket and their feet were exposed and somebody else was remarked, oh, that's Mitch McConnell.
They saw their face. And the person I spoke to also captured a short video of this moment. If we had known the circumstances around McConnell's hospitalization, Earlier or in more fulsome detail, you know, how he was transported to the hospital might not have been that big of a deal. But because we were dealing with such little amounts of information, the fact that he was transported to a hospital on a stretcher. was important for this story to fill, because we were just trying to fill in any blanks that we could and try and provide that transparency at a moment when we were getting very little from the senator and his team. So while you at CNN are trying to figure out what exactly has happened to one of the most powerful political figures of our era...
People online are also trying to figure out, and a lot of them believe him dead.
Mitch McConnell is dead.
I mean, that's what all of us think.
Is this a full-on Weekend at Bernie situation with Mitch McConnell?
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