Pneumonia and politics… September 16, 2016
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Odd that pneumonia should come up in the public discourse. As is mentioned elsewhere on the site today some years ago I had pneumonia. I’ve got to admit I never understood until I had it just how easy it must be for those who are very weak to slip away from it. In the space of three days I went from felling a little off weather to coughing up blood. It took another two days before I got medical attention (I kept telling myself it wasn’t blood but dark phlegm – my stupid). The doctor who saw me told me that had I presented myself even a few hours later he’d have sent me to hospital for oxygen.
But more happily antibiotics worked with incredible speed. Within half a day I was much more my old self. And I was back at work in about five days – which was also pretty stupid in retrospect. Another week off to mend would have been better.
And just this weekend I was talking to someone whose aunt had died from it so rapidly, literally across a day or two, that they thought it might be something entirely different that had caused her death. So I have lot of sympathy on a human level for Hillary Clinton.
That said to be still attending functions two days after being diagnosed is odd. Dedication yes, but focused incorrectly. There’s no substitute for bed rest and antibiotics, even if one is running for President of the United States.
What’s odd about this is the way that Trump and his proxies have been pushing the sick Hillary line and for it to come true. It is possible she had it for a while now, there’s a supposedly ‘walking’ version of pneumonia where the person infected has a milder version, but… . One can almost picture the satisfaction in the Trump camp at this line having some tangibility to it.
But as to the future? How does this play? Any thoughts?
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
I think the illness in itself is not the problem – it’s the lack of honesty/transparency about it –
For example:
-She “over-heated” – OK she was “over-dressed” in what seemed to be a rather heavy trouser suit for the weather on the day;
-She appeared fine an hour or so later, yet she had had pneumonia since the previous Friday when she had attended a rally;
– Her pneumonia wasn’t contagious, yet a lot of her staff had been off sick;
-If she collapsed with a “secret” pneumonia why wasn’t she taken to the nearest hospital? How did the security detail know what caused the collapse? Couldn’t it have been a heart attack, stroke or something else that was serious?
The spin generates distrust among voters.
Consider also the E mail scandal when she couldn’t remember anything.
What American wants an absent-minded spin-master for president?
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Anyone else find it odd that both candidates for the presidency should be so old? I thought we were swinging the opposite way for a while – when Cowan, Cameron and Obama were all in office, all three jobs, for the first time in all cases, were held by people younger than me. Come next January – assuming Enda survives that long, all will be held by people considerably older that me, and I’m just about clinging to middle age
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As to the future, how might this play?
Oddly enough, I think it could play well for Clinton. Up to now most of the media (and us?) have been obsessed with Trump – what he said, what he did, day in, day out. And there’s been little enough about Clinton. Now the spotlight is on her. I heard her on the radio this morning and she came across well. The media will be following her closely for the next while and maybe the voters will be more switched on to what she’s saying and how she’s saying it.
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Clinton has made a play for the center and moderate Republican voters, which is turning off the Sanders supporters who are mostly independent and the left of the Democratic party.
The deplorables was apparently a strategy to allow the nice republicans to denounce the beastial lower classes supporting Trump and move into Clinton’s column.
With that strategy a Clinton victory comes with Republican majorities in the senate and house. Recent polling is now showing the senate likely to remain in Republican hands.
Problem is, this election the people are angry at the establishment, see the low levels of support for president, congress, supreme court. And Clinton is establishment, so is Trump but he is able to portray himself as not.
We have just go to hope that Trump really doesn’t want the job of president and won’t build the ground game operation that Clinton will. We have to hope that he really is just aiming to found a new media entity along the lines of Fox but more fairer and balancederer.
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You’re assuming that pathological liars like the Clintons are telling the truth about the pneumonia diagnosis. I wouldn’t be so quick to believe them. Just because the rightwing sites are the ones harping on about her medical status doesn’t mean that it’s tinfoil.
Dr. Drew’s show was canceled a couple of weeks ago after an interview in which he suggested that HRC had a serious health condition. So don’t be shocked if heads have been kept under parapets after that high-profile decapitation.
Full interview:
HRC is one more health event away from catastrophe. It won’t just be the health matter, but the honesty issue that will sink her.
T is closing the gap that had opened up post – convention. As Adrian Kavanagh noted, if you look at the four-way polls, it’s looking very close indeed. Add to that the ‘shy trumper’, and a nasty surprise may beckon in November.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton_vs_johnson_vs_stein-5952.html
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Its good to live in a democratic republic where we have a choice:
‘a choice between the unpalatable and the unthinkable’-(John Cassidy in The New Yorker)
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