It's Not the Pneumonia, It's the Secrecy

So Hillary Clinton has pneumonia.  After nearly passing out in New York at the 9/11 ceremonies on Sunday, stumbling around badly and being shoved into a waiting limo, her handlers were forced hours later to admit that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia, an obviously life-threatening medical situation.

On Friday.

Yes, for two days Hillary Clinton was out on the campaign trail, risking her life to raise ever more money in the pursuit of her ambition to be president of the United States.  OK, I'm sorry, her ambition is not actually to be president, i.e., to run the country, as much as it is to win the presidency and thumb her nose at her "husband."

Remember when I wrote long ago about trying to understand things in their simplest form, evaluating evidence based on consistency with guilt and inconsistency with innocence?

Let's rewind back to Friday.  Hillary has been coughing all week, and trying to make jokes of it.  Then on Friday, she sees a doctor who diagnoses her with pneumonia.

What would any of us do, even if we were running for president?  We'd stand up and make a statement that we're taking a few days off to rest and heal up and we'll be back on the trail Tuesday better than ever.  We'd gratefully accept the nation's sympathy and take full advantage of it after a few days of healing rest and medication.

But that is we, and if we know anything about Hillary it's that she is definitely not one of us.

No, after the Friday diagnosis Hillary immediately goes into full-scale information-shutdown mode, keeps the news on close hold to her immediate, unelected group of lawyers, sycophants and lackeys, and plans to go through with her full schedule of fund-raisers and ceremonies.  She was "overheated", the lackeys tell us.  The word "pneumonia" is not to be uttered on penalty of something or other.

And imagine this ... Hillary, who knows by Sunday that she has pneumonia, has a fainting spell at the 9/11 ceremonies in New York, and is immediately driven to, not a hospital as medical protocol would demand, but her daughter's condo in Manhattan.  In other words, her secrecy about her health is more important to her than her health itself.

The only reason we even know about her pneumonia is because her doctor -- presumably to defend himself against accusations of mistreatment of her -- released a public statement on Sunday that he had diagnosed her with with the disease.

What does that tell you?

It tells you, first, that you could expect to believe absolutely nothing about anything she says if, God forbid, she would ever to become president.  This is the United States, someone should tell her, not the Soviet Union or North Korea.  Hillary Clinton's trustworthiness numbers are in the toilet, and they just flowed all the way into the sewer.

She would follow, God forbid, the opaque Obama administration that was supposed to be the "most transparent" in history.  What we need is actual transparency, but what we would get is the poker-faced, lying, email-deleting, device-smashing, bit-bleaching, smug and self-important attitude so exemplified in this episode.

One has to wonder, when Hillary got pushed into the limo after collapsing, who among the candidate, the Secret Service, the immediate corps of lackeys, etc., told the driver, "Head to Chelsea's condo immediately -- not the hospital!"  The Secret Service would be "Hospital NOW!", right?  They're trying to protect her.  Someone had to overrule them, with enough power to stop the limo from going to the hospital.

And that's the problem.  The opacity.  The lies.  The deception.  The failure to tell the USA of her health crisis.  The lying to the USA about the health crisis.  The decision by someone that hiding the nature of the problem by going to Chelsea's condo was more important than Hillary's actual health.

The secrecy.  the secrecy.  the secrecy.

Hillary Clinton must never be president.  Never.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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