RE: What if new email leaks reveal that the hag suffers from

Posted on: September 12, 2016 at 10:46:19 CT

in the summer of 1893, for four long days, nobody knew where the president of the United States was. Grover Cleveland was a fairly substantial human and very hard to lose, but he'd disappeared anyway. The country was spiraling down into the Panic of 1893 because laissez-faire economics continued to be the plutocrat's game they've always been. The Reading Railroad—fabled in song, story, and on the Monopoly board—had gone under, taking banks and hundreds of ancillary businesses down with it. Four million people became unemployed, but President Cleveland had done nothing because market forces, that's why. The ensuing depression took up much of the rest of the decade, and in the summer of 1893, the president took a powder.

It was ultimately announced that the president was on a friend's yacht, fishing off Cape Cod. The truth was that the president indeed was on the yacht, but he was there to have a malignant tumor removed from his mouth. It was assumed (correctly) that an announcement that the president had cancer would send what was left of the national economy straight into the crapper, so not only was the surgery kept secret, it was designed so as not to disturb the president's trademark mustache. Despite the fact that a Philadelphia reporter sussed out most of the story, and was subsequently smeared by the president's operatives, the whole story didn't come out until one of the doctors involved gave himself up over 20 years later.

And this is not even to mention the fact that, unbeknownst to the country, Woodrow Wilson's wife ran the country after the president's debilitating stroke, or that there was an ironclad gentleman's agreement between the Roosevelt White House and the press not to mention that FDR governed from a wheelchair that held for almost 16 years, or that John F. Kennedy was seriously ill and getting through the day with amphetamines, or that, at least from 1984 to 1988, the country was governed by a symptomatic Alzheimer's patient. Which is to say, in conclusion, that medical transparency has been honored more in the breach than not down through the years, and it always has been subordinate to tawdry political imperatives and/or what is perceived to be the national interest.

So, if her campaign is to be believed, Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigned with walking pneumonia for two days before finally being overcome on Sunday, at a memorial service at Ground Zero in New York. She since has canceled a west coast fundraising trip and her health, which long has been a fertile ground for nutball conspiracy mongers and oppo cat burglars, now is an "issue" because of "transparency," and it's a sexier issue than, say, the fact that Donald Trump took 20 large worth of charitable donations and bought a lifesized painting of himself, the lowest bit of low parody in his most ridiculous campaign.

It "plays into" the "narrative" that the Clintons are parsimonious with everything but parsing. Just last week, The National Enquirer, run by Trump's pal, David Pecker, ran a cover story in which their bombshell expose of what the fishwrap claimed was HRC's full medical record held that she is suffering from Alzheimer's, a damaged liver "from booze," and that she has had three strokes. Which I guess means she has to get up-and-down from Chelsea's apartment to save par and maintain her lead.

The enabling mechanisms of the elite political media went into full operation shortly thereafter. Not that they believe that she really has had three strokes, or that she's a booze-soaked Alzheimer's patient with liver damage, mind you. It's just that, if she were a little more "transparent," all of these concerns would vanish into the air and the Enquirer could go back to pestering the Kardsashians. David Axelrod, the president's old campaign genius, has been particularly vigorous on pushing this particular line on the electric Twitter machine.

Do I think that the Clintons are unusually wary about their coverage? I do. Do I think they have a decent set of reasons to be so? I do. Do I think this is going to stick in the craw of the elite political media for the next four to eight years? Alas, I do. I wish she were a little better at finessing the difference between justifiable caution and justifiable paranoia. Maybe she should buy a yacht.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a48520/hillary-health-issues/