On Saturday I was perusing Bluesky, and posts like this were all over the place:
US Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, hasn’t voted since July. The Dallas Express reports that it found her in a “memory care and assisted living home” after she was “found wandering lost and confused in her” old neighborhood. She is 81 and a sitting congresswoman.
dallasexpress.com/tarrant/excl…
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) December 21, 2024 at 7:04 PM
One might note a couple of things about this. The story comes from a wingnut “news” site that probably none of us had heard of before this encounter. It contains multiple unsourced or uncorroborated allegations. Just a month ago, Rep. Granger was in DC being publicly feted for her career, which anyone with any experience with dementia can tell you is absolutely not something that a person in memory care who is a risk to wander off could handle. It’s true that she hadn’t cast a vote in Congress in several months, and there’s a story that should have been reported about that. This was not that story, it was a hit piece filled with reckless speculation.
And after at least 24 hours of that story being shared all over the Internet – a Google news search on Saturday for her name was filled with identical versions of the story from equally dubious sources – there was finally a story from a more reputable outlet about the situation.
Retiring U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth, has missed votes in Congress since the summer and her son said she has been “having some dementia issues late in the year.”
The last time the 81-year-old congresswoman cast a vote on the House floor was the morning of July 24.
In a statement from her office, Rep. Granger expressed gratitude for the public’s concern and said that since early September, her health issues have made frequent travel to Washington, D.C., “both difficult and unpredictable.”
“As many of my family, friends, and colleagues have known, I have been navigating some unforeseen health challenges over the past year,” the statement said.
She added she was able to return to Washington in November to hold meetings and oversee the closure of her office.
From South Carolina, Brandon Granger, 52, told The Dallas Morning News Sunday morning, “It’s been a hard year,” adding it has been a surprise how quickly it progressed.
Brandon said his mother is living at Tradition Senior Living in Fort Worth, but she is not in a memory care facility, as some media reports have stated. He said that while the facility has a memory care community on the same property, Rep. Granger resides in the independent living facility.
On its website, Tradition Senior Living says it offers “resort-style living with ultra-inclusive services” on “approximately six acres along the Trinity River with miles of walking trails.” Brandon said she made the move because she wanted to be in a more active community of other older people.
“There’s nothing wrong with someone wanting to live in a community with other folks their age,” he said. “She’s in a building with a lot of other folks her age that are super active that she really loves. She has exercise classes, she gets to be around people all the time, it’s wonderful for her for this point in life.”
Tradition Senior Living said it was not able to confirm the residency status of any individual when reached by phone Sunday morning.
After the publication of the DMN story, a bunch of more mainstream outlets jumped in, though some still largely parroted the original hit piece. I’ll credit Axios doing some good followup reporting and approaching the underlying issues about the advanced age of some members of Congress and the lack of transparency about Rep. Granger’s absence with a fair amount of seriousness. All I can say is that I’ve never felt the adage about a lie getting halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on more acutely.
There’s still a lot we don’t know here, and frankly some of it we’ll probably never know, and some of that is fine and appropriate. I don’t have the energy to litigate this in detail, but having had personal experience with dementia in loved ones, it is fully credible to me that Rep. Granger’s situation went from one where she was mostly in control to one where she just couldn’t operate as she had done before quickly an unexpectedly. I’m happy to have a larger conversation about how old Congress is and how hard it is for younger candidates to get elected and younger members to advance. I’m just angry that this conversation, such as it is, was started by a nasty hit piece that was full of reckless speculation, all of which was swallowed whole by far too many people. That’s what really sucks here, as far as I’m concerned.
UPDATE: For those that want to know more about the Dallas Express and sites like it, the Texas Observer has done you that service. I think what most offended me about this whole saga is that there were actual journalists like Sahil Kapur doing the sharing without first asking themselves if the source they were boosting was a credible one.
Did Kuffner get as upset as what was said and being said about President Biden?
I’m not going to dignify that with a response, Manny. Merry Christmas.
This makes more sense as anyone knows who has loved ones in any sort of facility for memory care or assisted living care, $4,000/month would not cover the expenses of most of these places (at least in the Houston area). However, it would cover the Senior Living type apartments.