Through the miracle drug of television, video and never-ending internet photo files, the once Great and Powerful Dr. Oz, has made himself the laughing stock of this year’s 2022 Elections. I doubt if even Oprah will have anything to do with him anymore.
Shortly after Dr. Oz of New Jersey declared his candidacy for the US Senate Seat in Pennsylvania last year, I wrote about how the mere thought of the synthetic, slippery Wizard of Oz, Donald Trump’s hyper Hydroxychloroquine cheerleader, turning that cradle of American Democracy into its crypt, was enough to make me want to swallow some of Oz’ ostracized Green Coffee Beans.
This year, Jon Fetterman—a brilliant, humorous, no-bullshit Democratic Candidate for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat—has masterfully used those same magic green coffee beans, and a host of other Ozzian scams, to repeatedly roast the hapless TV host and hydroxycloroquine hawker.
While New York Times columnist Frank Bruni reminded us two years ago that Dr. Oz was “not a virologist; not an epidemiologist,” even though he plays one on TV, Fetterman reminds us daily that Oz prefers his $35 million New Jersey Mansion, to the streets of Philadelphia.
For more than two years, before emerging as fellow TV liar Donald Trump’s magic cure for the US Senate, the Wizard of Oz appeared regularly on Fox News, disseminating misinformation about COVID like Johnny Appleseed, while hundreds of thousands of Americans died from the disease. At least, to Dr. Oz’ credit, he didn’t tell them to swallow bleach.
Instead, in advising Donald Trump and White House staff during the early, deadly days of the COVID Pandemic, Oz relentlessly promoted Hydroxychloroquine as a “wonder drug” for COVID, much as he hawked “green coffee beans” as a “miracle cure” for obesity (they weren’t), and told millions of mothers that their childrens’ apple juice had “dangerous levels of arsenic” (it didn’t). Columbia University’s Institute of Human Nutrition has called many of Dr. Oz’s ideas about food “just plain nutty.”
Eight years earlier, the Great & Powerful Oz’s Medicine Show cures—spoonfed to his four millions daily viewers—got him hauled before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, chaired by then-Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill.
Senator McCaskill blasted Dr. Oz for spreading lies and misinformation: “I don’t get why you have to say this stuff because you know it’s not true.” Oz promised the Senate he wouldn’t do it anymore. But, with his hyperbole and hypocrisy increasing his personal wealth to $100 million, Oz just couldn’t resist.
In 2016, only two years after the he pledged to the Senate that he would stop his medical charlatanry, Oz was oozing lies again. This time, it happened during the heat of the Clinton/Trump presidential campaign when the public was demanding that Trump release his medical records, Dr. Oz—“America’s Doctor” as he billed himself—came to the Mar-A-Lago Liar’s rescue.
On Oz’s nationally televised show, Trump dramatically reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out two pages he claimed were his medical records and handed them over to Oz. Using his best bedside manner, Dr. Oz—who never physically examined Trump– deemed the records—and Trump’s health–to be sound. Now, pop a few of these green coffee beans Donald, and you can go from being morbidly obese to Mr. America!
Vox, in it’s September 15, 2016, review of the two men in front of the curtain of the Oz show, said: “ These men (Oz & Trump) are the personification of not just bullshitting to the public, but getting away with bullshitting—and profiting from it.”
Now, the Great and Powerful Oz wants to take his Traveling Elixir Show to the US Senate, where, if successful, he’ll join that other medical genius, Senator Rand Paul, an eye doctor with absolutely zero expertise in virology or immunology, and a penchant for picking fights with his next door neighbor in Kentucky and Dr. Anthony Fauci in public hearings– both of which Rowdy Rand embarrassingly lost. Imagine Oz and Rand Paul, in a GOP-controlled Senate, as the leading Republican “medical” experts on a pandemic which has killed more than one million Americans.
Perhaps Dr. Oz figures that one way to escape another Senate grilling, under oath, for his newest massive waterfall of false information during the final year of Trump’s toxic term, is to spend millions of the dollars he amassed with his monumental medical mendacity, to sit side-by-side with Senator Paul in the US Senate to compare notes, magical thinking, and hold up charts of the color of good earwax and bad earwax, waxing inelegantly on its’ link to socialist ideas.
Just think of the even greater damage these fountainheads of falsehoods and myths can do, when they can somberly spout more medical misinformation with impunity, under the protection of Congressional immunity. And to think, we wouldn’t be able to sue either one for malpractice…
Fortunately for all of us, Toto has appeared in the form of a 6’8” Fetterman Pincher who gleefully shreds the flimsy curtain from in front of all of Oz’ latest scams, revealing the Great and Powerful One for the carnival barker and carpetbagger he really is. Crudite, anyone?
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