By Matt Rooney
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So I was attending the Camden County GOP’s Lincoln Day event on Saturday night when I found out that Governor Phil Murphy had a tumor on his kidney; I was immediately and sincerely concerned for the guy, Save Jerseyans.
Cancer doesn’t care about your party affiliation or bank account. It’s merciless, and while the Governor’s prognosis is apparently good, it’s still scary as hell for him and his family. We’ve all been there.
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Murphy made the disclosure via Twitter:
Friends – I’ve got a tumor on my left kidney and will undergo a partial nephrectomy in early March to remove it. The prognosis is very good and I’m profoundly grateful to my doctors for detecting the tumor early.
— Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) February 23, 2020
“Friends – I’ve got a tumor on my left kidney and will undergo a partial nephrectomy in early March to remove it,” Murphy tweeted. “The prognosis is very good and I’m profoundly grateful to my doctors for detecting the tumor early.”
Yikes.
And then the Governor promptly proceeded to politicize his own tumor:
Health care is a right, not a privilege for a select few, and skyrocketing medical costs are a national emergency. If there’s anything my diagnosis reminds me of, it’s that preventative services are lifesaving and we need to continue fighting for affordable health care for all.
— Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) February 23, 2020
Sigh.
Leave it to Phil Murphy to make even feeling bad for him difficult! I still do, of course, but good God he certainly likes to make it a challenge.
Look: the man is obviously entitled to his opinions and especially right now. He’s also entitled to his emotions. At the same time, you can’t help but wonder why he’d choose this moment to give everyone a condescending lecture on affordable health care. Was he reacting emotionally? Did his staff robotically generate an on-message tweet? Was he trying to bait someone into saying something stupid, especially ahead of his forthcoming budget speech?
Who knows. Thankfully, the vast majority of tweets/FB posts I’ve seen from Murphy opponents have been nothing but supportive.
Let Murphy politicize his tumor, folks.
You shouldn’t.
Not only is it gross and ghoulish (think about how YOU felt reading vile things about Rush Limbaugh’s lung cancer diagnosis), but we don’t want to play this game. We don’t want the Republican coalition to be seen as engaged in the sort of obsessive, mean-spirited, hyper-ideological politics that quite clearly animates the Bernie Sanders-era socialist Democrats. Because we’re not that. It’s not who we are.
We could make references to the care he’d get in a country that’s name starts with a “V” but I urge you to resist the impulse.
Remember: everything to them is political.
Everything to us is people. That’s the reason why I’ll be praying extra hard for the Governor, Tammy, and his children this Sunday and every Sunday through his March surgery date. I hope you’ll join me.
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Save Jersey’s Founder and Blogger-in-Chief, MATT ROONEY is a nationally-noted and respected New Jersey political commentator. When he’s not on-line, radio or television advocating for conservative reform and challenging N.J. power-brokers, Matt is a practicing attorney at the law firm of DeMichele & DeMichele in Haddon Heights (Camden County).
