Editor’s note: naturally, it’s always at the precise moment you start to fall behind a little bit that the news insists of feeding you more “have to discuss” stories one after another. I am currently hard at work on a piece about Joy-Ann Reid and the new McCarthyism; as well as a discussion of protest in America as it relates to Colin Kaepernick and the Standing Rock anti-pipeline protests. Unfortunately, the shocking events at yesterday’s 9/11 memorial in NYC and the flagrant, unbearably offensive behavior of the pro-Clinton, neoliberal media at large in response to those events are going to force me to have this discussion here and now before I can get back to writing about those other things.
This is primarily going to be an op-ed and since I really don’t want to waste more time than necessary on this, I’ll be scattering my sources throughout the article with a little less set up than normal; please, I’m begging you – don’t angrily ask me for “sources” if you’re not going to click on the links in this article that provide them.
First of all, let me start off by confessing that until this precise moment I have largely ignored the Hillary Clinton “Health Scandal” for two reasons that perhaps in retrospect haven’t worked out all that well for me:
- When the story first broke, it was primarily championed by the absolutely dregs of Right Wing Nutjob media; places like the Drudge Report and journalists who’s methods I personally consider less than reputable, to put it politely. Furthermore the news pretty much revolved around people who’d never examined Hillary Clinton in a clinical setting commenting on news clips and blown up still frames that objectively didn’t prove a whole lot and in some cases were obvious smear jobs. Ethical doctors are not prone to diagnosing patients they’ve never met (from eighteen seconds of Youtube footage) and distinguished luminaries such as Doctor Drew aside; the vast majority of the people discussing the issue were simply not very credible.
- The simple truth is, I didn’t think it would matter in the goddamn slightest. Despite years and years of campaign rhetoric about the importance of energy and vigor in a President; it doesn’t matter one iota to a candidate’s qualifications for the job if he or she is too ill to complete a season of American Ninja Warrior. Numerous past Presidents have suffered from significant, even serious physical ailments and while these illnesses were invariably the subject of great secrecy and speculation – as long as the politician in question didn’t actually fucking die, the American public generally seems comfortable putting on it’s blinders and ignoring a President’s physical (and even mental) infirmities.
Late yesterday morning (and only after watching multiple video clips that I will share below) I came to the sudden and yes, shocking realization that I’d been as they say in the business “completely fucking wrong” about both the severity and potential importance of the Hillary Clinton heath scandal. Of course, my first clue probably should have been when major media outlets began firing employees for merely discussing Clinton’s health “issues” in a manner that in no way, shape or form appeared to be ethically “out of bounds” by any objective measure of the things in the media that do get published without anyone being fired.
Please understand that I use the expression “health scandal” both because I’m not particularly qualified to diagnose exactly what is wrong with Clinton, but also because even in the seemingly unlikely event that Clinton’s ailment really is pneumonia; the lies, attacks and distortions used by both the Clinton campaign and surrogates/supporters in pro-Clinton media do now represent a “scandal” in their own right. Let’s take a look at a rough timeline of how this whole thing shook out first and afterwards, I’ll explain why I suspect Hillary is still lying about her health and why it really doesn’t matter anyway because the damage has already been done.
Read the rest of the article on ninaillingworth.com now...
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