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Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old...
- Leviticus 19:32a
Old age is a shipwreck.
- Gen. Charles de Gaulle
It grieves us to be forced to ridicule an elderly woman in manifestly ill health. We all have mothers and grandmothers; would you want your mother to be the object of fun as she totters down the hall on her walker?
But Mrs. Bill Clinton isn't my mother, or yours; she's Chelsea's. Although she's tried to sell herself as the nation's grandmother, she doesn't want to be our mothers - she'd much rather be our queen, or at least our nanny.
To be fair, we have had elderly Presidents before; Hillary isn't the oldest by a considerable margin. We have also had handicapped Presidents (FDR), and presidents so seriously ill that the country was run by their wives.
Aside from the fever-swamps of the Internet, nobody is much concerned about that happening to a President Hillary; and if the country were instead run by her husband for a while, well, it might be an uncomfortable time to be a female White House intern but for the rest of the country, past history suggests that it might not be so bad.
All joking aside, though, the Presidency is not a job that can be effectively handled while on sick leave - though apparently it can be done just fine from the golf course. Sure, we all catch the flu occasionally. But after Gerald Ford fell down the stairs of Air Force One, the news media mercilessly hammered home his image as a total klutz. This despite Mr. Ford being a championship football all-star player some decades before, hardly the hallmark of a clumsy oaf.
More recently, the media still shivers at the thought of an early-stage-Alzheimer's President Reagan. Considering that the Evil Empire collapsed shortly after he left office, though, he obviously didn't do too badly for himself even if he couldn't remember all his own greatness. At least we know Donald Trump would never have that particular problem!
A President, of course, has the very best possible medical care available anywhere in the world. Hillary is not even President yet, and she has an apparently constant level of medical oversight and assistance - whether it be helping her up stairs apparently too steep for her to handle or bundling her into a van when she's unable to stand up straight.
We are told this happened because she was suffering from pneumonia at the 9-11 ceremony and overheated. It's not clear how you can do both at the same time, especially when the day in question was quite comfortably in the 80's.
And that's the real problem here: we have no idea what the truth is, and we all know that there's no possible way we ever will feel like we know even if somebody accidentally tells us the truth.
Hillary doesn't require the exalted credibility of Honest Abe. If her reputation was merely ordinary decency and honesty, a simple explanation like "pneumonia" would be perfectly acceptable.
But it's not. When someone is willing to lie about their own name, it's impossible to take anything else they might say at face value. Does Hillary have epilepsy? A serious brain injury? Something worse? Just the sniffles? Who knows? And, more to the point, who could persuasively convince us that we know? The Clinton billions can surely persuade any number of doctors to write whatever reports are desired, conclusively declaring her to be anything from an alien lizard to Jesus Christ Incarnate.
What can you do when your closest aide says you are "often confused," and even liberal feminists are forced to agree that you have a serious problem with secretiveness? When celebrity Democratic strategist David Axelrod says "It isn’t about the health, it’s about the stealth"? When hardly a week goes by without more news footage of you looking like someone in desperate need of a wheelchair?
Well, for once Hillary has been making a wise decision: she's been taking weekends off, and is now taking off even more time. Which, of course, is exactly what doctors recommend for pneumonia patients, and for many other patients for that matter. Lots of people at her age of 68 have all their time off, otherwise known as "being retired." Given the prospects for the economy in this millennium, though, fewer and fewer Americans have any hope of achieving a comfortable retirement; perhaps Hillary is simply exemplifying the "work until you literally drop" fate she envisions for the rest of us?
That's not what we want for ourselves, but a medical retirement is not at all ideal for someone running for President, which is more than a full-time job. And it's a really serious problem for anyone who wants to be president: we all know how much presidents physically age over a term or two. Is it really a good idea to start a Presidency off with one foot in the grave? One shudders to think of the infamous 3AM phone call in the hands of someone who can't stand up straight in broad daylight or who tells the FBI she can't remember any one of many top-security briefings.
Let's be realistic: There is probably not one single person whose vote will change as a result of Hillary's health problems or because of her lies about them either. Hillary could die and she'd still command double digits in the polls; mere congresscritters have been elected despite being deceased, so that wouldn't be much of an obstacle to the First! Woman! President! (post-mortem).
No, Mrs. Clinton's lifelong reputation for dishonesty far predates any of her electoral campaigns, and anybody who was willing to vote for her in the primary clearly couldn't care less. For all his faults, Bernie Sanders appears to be an honest man, but that wasn't enough for Democrat voters. No, they'd rather have a crafty pathological liar.
Instead, they got a senile dementia patient being propped up behind dark glasses. Which is worse? As if the stakes this November weren't already high enough!