Being a TV doctor who decides on a midlife career change to politics comes with its advantages: the ability to self-fund your campaign, being comfortable on television, and instant name recognition, even if the topic of your residency in the state you’re running to represent draws national mockery.
But there are downsides. For example, you—meaning Dr. Mehmet Oz—might have a bunch of tweets exploring the nuances of shitting.
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The retired surgeon, who hosted a daytime talk show for over a decade before launching a run for Senate in Pennsylvania earlier this year, has nearly two dozen posts going back to 2009 giving people advice about poop. Apparently, 2009 was the summer Dr. Oz got really into literal shitposting, starting with a link to the Bristol stool chart.
Not even four hours later, he sought to drive the conversation about pooping. (Less than a month later, Dr. Oz was similarly very excited about a pee chart.)
But he didn’t necessarily want to be a part of that conversation.
To be fair to Dr. Oz, not all of his poop posts were unprompted. On March 23, 2010—the same day Obamacare was signed into law, weirdly enough—a now-inactive account with the handle SuperSexyLady asked Dr. Oz why her poop was black. Dr. Oz gave some helpful advice:
After this exchange, which appeared to weird Dr. Oz out a bit, he took a long break from #poop #content, save for a 2013 post that now awkwardly redirects to his campaign site’s donation page. But in 2018, he came roaring back with a whole episode of his show dedicated to poop, featuring the comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, complete with a fairly dramatic trailer promoting it:
After this episode, it seems Dr. Oz put his poop era behind him, at least for the most part. Though there are 10 more tweets about pooping in 2019 and 2020, they all say “This is the right way to poop” and link to an article titled “You’ve Been Pooping Wrong Your Whole Life.”
It’s not clear why Dr. Oz’s social media team was pushing this article so hard. Even more confusing, the header image on the story shows a man standing facing the toilet and holding a roll of toilet paper. Fact-checkers confirm this is not the right way to poop. Four Pinocchios.
The tweets were still up on Dr. Oz’s account as of Monday, and it’s not like he needed any more mockery.
Despite the fact that Republicans currently hold the Senate seat in question and it’s likely the GOP will win control of the House in the November midterms, recent polls show Oz losing badly to Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. In recent weeks, he’s become mired in debates over “crudité” and just how many properties he owns, two things you definitely want if you’re posturing as working class to win over blue-collar voters.
It all seems pretty stressful. An earlier version of Dr. Oz might have even asked how he’s pooping these days.
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