It should not be surprising nor concerning that a woman nearly 70 years of age has some health problems, but attempting to conceal evidence of the condition of her health could be a cause for concern. Hillary Clinton is running to be the president of the United States, and her health is thus a matter of national importance. As Bill Clinton said in 1996 when he was the president: ‘The public has a right to know the condition of the president’s health.’
That the presidential candidate of a major party in America should be so consistently dishonest and secretive about her health, in a worrisome pattern of dishonesty and secrecy, is a matter of legitimate public concern. With the Clintons, mistrust is always advisable.
Early in 1998, the Bill Clinton administration reacted to allegations that the president had carried on a sordid affair with a 21-year-old White House intern by trying to discredit the intern, Monica Lewinsky, as a liar and a stalker; however, there were talks that she had in her possession conclusive evidence of the affair — a stained blue dress. The proof that Bill Clinton had carried on an affair with a White House intern could have brought down his presidency. As several weeks passed, and no dress was produced, the administration and Clinton’s supporters in the media grew increasingly confident that there actually was no dress, no DNA evidence of his misconduct. So instead of ignoring the dress, they talked about it endlessly, labeling it a rumor and one more example of paranoia by Clinton’s deranged enemies in the “vast right wing conspiracy.” The Clintons characterized their critics as a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” even though many claims made by the “conspirators” turned out to be true.
Then, in July 1998, Monica Lewinsky produced the blue dress, and testing showed that the stain on the dress contained Bill Clinton’s DNA. The stained dress proved that he was both an adulterer and a liar. He had committed adultery with a young underling in the White House, and blatantly lied to the American people: “I never had sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky, and I never told anybody to lie, not a single time.”
Monica Lewinsky was unable to produce the dress earlier because she was negotiating an immunity deal with prosecutors. She had lied under oath claiming not to have had sex with Bill Clinton in a case that former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones had brought against him from an incident that had occurred when he was governor of Arkansas. Bill Clinton’s credibility was damaged. His supporters knew that they could no longer believe him. He lied to them too. He assured Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other staunch defenders that there was no stained dress because there had been no adultery.
The pattern with Hillary Clinton’s health problems is remarkably similar. Early in 2016, there were indications that she had significant health problems. Her coughing spells and other episodes caused some critics to raise the possibility that she was not well. At first, Hillary and her campaign staff denied that there was anything seriously wrong with her. Later, they saw a possible political advantage in making an issue of her critics’ questions about her health. They ridiculed and taunted the “vast right-wing conspiracy” theorists that accused her of hiding emails, lying about Benghazi, and claiming she was physically unfit.
Then, approaching her vehicle as she left a September 11 memorial ceremony in New York, Hillary Clinton fainted. The episode was caught on videotape. She drooped, and then collapsed as she was grabbed under the arms and held up by aides. She lost a shoe as she was lifted and practically thrown into the vehicle, and then whisked away.
The video of her collapse outside the memorial ceremony was shocking. It showed someone looking completely out of it, being propped up by her aides and then collapsing. After hours of deeply suspicious silence, her aides initially said it was caused by ‘over-heating’. They stated that Manhattan was 'very hot' that morning. Actually, it was warm, around 80 degrees. They assured the world that she had simply ‘over-heated’. That was a deliberate falsehood designed to downplay her condition. Just as it was when they had blamed her coughing fit the previous week on ‘allergies.’
The Hillary Clinton campaign initially claimed that their candidate had simply become dehydrated and overheated on a mild summer day. As the videotape was relentlessly replayed, the campaign was forced to admit publicly that she had been suffering from pneumonia, which they had known two days before. In denying that there was anything seriously wrong with her, they had been lying to the public. Now, many Americans are wondering whether even this story is the whole truth.
It is not unreasonable to think that Hillary is deceiving the American people about her health, given that she deceives them about practically everything, constantly. She encourages speculation about her activities and motives by essentially treating every detail of her life like a covert operation.
Hillary has fainted before, suffering a concussion and blood clot, and then claimed to a U.S. law enforcement agency that her injuries were severe enough to cause important gaps in her memory. In 2005 she fainted before a scheduled speech in Buffalo, New York, after contracting a stomach virus. In December 2012 she fainted and suffered a concussion after suffering a similar stomach virus, and shortly afterward developed a blood clot.
After Hillary’s collapse outside the ceremony, her aides took her to her daughter’s apartment instead of taking her to a hospital. This could be to safeguard leakages of the full extent of her ailment. Pneumonia is not a trivial matter, but she could be suffering from something even worse. Hillary’s word and the word of her campaign spokespeople should not be taken at face value.
Accepting Hillary’s word about her own health could be indicative of a lack of seriousness. Her team not only kept reporters “totally in the dark for 90 minutes,” they allegedly barred them from following her. A pool of reporters generally follows American presidential candidates. Given her history of broad, continuous, craven, deep, overarching, rampant, relentless dishonesty about practically every aspect of her life, it is not unreasonable to expect that she could lie about her health.
Despite suffering from pneumonia, Hillary Clinton embraced a young child after leaving her daughter's apartment. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pneumonia is a contagious illness that is spread from person-to-person when small droplets of water that contain the bacteria get into the air and people breathe them in. Those infected usually spread the disease while in close contact with others, who then breathe in the bacteria.
Pneumonia is a serious affliction. In the United States alone, one million people seek hospital care for it every year, and of those about 50,000 die of the disease. Most people who get it are prescribed several days or weeks of bed rest to recover. If infected, Hillary should not have continued with an election campaign schedule nor should she have attended the ceremony.
For safety reasons, it would have been much better for Hillary to be seated or lain on the ground than attempting to keep her erect outside. She appeared to have no ability to support her own weight. Her being propped up on the sidewalk waiting for a vehicle was also a safety issue. Generally, security does not allow a protected subject, like a presidential candidate, to stand near the road, but instead allows the vehicle to arrive before moving the subject from a more secure location to the arrived vehicle. It seems that appearances were more important than her safety or her receiving medical treatment. The aides should have gotten her immediate medical assistance. Instead they simply threw her into the van head first and took her to her daughter's house, rather than rushing her to the hospital. They appeared to be used to such an occurrence.
Bill and Hillary treat the credibility of their supporters as a disposable commodity. Before the September 11 memorial ceremony, the protective media had carried on for weeks about the illegitimacy of inquiries into Hillary’s health. They were repaid by her leaving reporters behind without notice at the ceremony; collapsing when she was out of their view (the incident was captured on video by a bystander); giving them a wave and a misleading “feeling great” outside of her daughter’s apartment, where she had gone to recover; and leaving them behind yet again to go to her home to see a doctor.
The most important job Hillary Clinton ever held was as the Secretary of State, heading the U.S. Department of State, principally concerned with foreign affairs; the U.S. government's equivalent of a Minister for Foreign Affairs. Under her watch as Secretary of State, American foreign policy had one setback after another, separated by disasters. Weeks away from the November 2016 elections, confirmation keeps emerging from Hillary’s communications that she did not tell the truth about the overlap between the Clinton Foundation and her tenure as the Secretary of State, and how she put national security in jeopardy by using an unsecured private email server in violation of government policy. There are still thousands of communications to be released under court order. More could surface to contradict her prior statements and to reveal more past improprieties. There is also the possibility that foreign hackers could have stolen her huge trove of “private” correspondence before she deleted it.
Hillary Clinton’s keeping America’s confidential matters on an unsecured private email server that could be accessed by foreign hackers and revealed to America’s enemies could be deemed a betrayal of trust, or incompetence.
Hillary was required to get training in how to handle confidential information before getting access to it, and she received the training. She was required to sign a document that says, “I understand that confidential information can be marked or unmarked,” which she signed. She was trusted with the intelligence secrets on which the national security of the United States depends, and she betrayed the trust.
Hillary Clinton has collapsed her credibility. She has deceived the American people about her health, her emails, her personal server, her advisers, her staff, and the special treatment given by the State Department to Clinton Foundation donors when she was the Secretary of State. She has deceived, misinformed and misled on almost every detail of her tenure as the Secretary of State, from the killings in Benghazi to her knowledge of sending and receiving classified materials. Just as Bill Clinton’s credibility was damaged by the production of the stained blue dress, Hillary Clinton’s credibility was devastated by her physical collapse. American voters would be unserious to trust Hillary Clinton.
Dr. Sheyin-Stevens is a Registered Patent Attorney based in Florida, USA. He earned his Doctorate in Law from the University of Miami.