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Send Facts, Not Rumors, on Clinton's Health -- and Trump's

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Hillary Clinton kept her pneumonia diagnosis under wraps for two days because she "didn't think it was going to be that big a deal." Right. That's what she used to say about her private email server.

Yes, I know Clinton's email server is an obsession that her rivals on the right will not let go. Fear and loathing motivate great political fundraising. But as I have written before, the former secretary of state knew that she and her ex-president husband had an abundance of political enemies before she gave them more ammunition to use against her.

What irritated me most about the news that Clinton really was ill with pneumonia, forcing her to leave the Sept. 11 memorial ceremony in New York early, is how it gave a moment of undeserved "I told you so" satisfaction to the industry of conspiracy theorists.

Even WikiLeaks appeared to be taking sides on Sunday, posting a poll that asked users to speculate about the cause of Clinton's "collapse." The poll, which WikiLeaks later deleted, looked to seasoned political eyes like a push poll, a legal but unethical practice of writing a poll not to measure public opinion but to sway voters with loaded or manipulative questions that help to spread negative rumors.

For months, various conservative cable TV and internet conspiracy theorists have been alleging that the former first lady has Parkinson's disease, epilepsy or dementia, which she is covering up with the help of a look-alike stand-in and a Secret Service agent who actually is a doctor and a hypnotist.

Like most conspiracy theories, all of this is going to make a really cool horror movie someday, but it has no basis in the real world.

 

More troubling for Clinton's supporters is the behavior pattern of which her pneumonia cover-up is only the latest example. David Axelrod, director of the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics, captured it well in a Monday morning tweet: "Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia. What's the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?"

Axelrod, who helped President Barack Obama beat Clinton to the Democratic nomination in 2008, understands how Team Clinton has plenty of right-wing critics and conspiracies to be paranoid about. But that's an excellent reason to be more transparent, not less.

Unfortunately, transparency is the opposite reflex to what Mrs. Clinton has been inclined to do. Clinton aides who derided reporters' health questions were admitting on Sunday that they should have let the world in on her health problems sooner.

Ironically, Clinton, once a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee that was weighing President Richard Nixon's possible impeachment, has taken on a Nixonian tendency toward self-destructive obsessions with privacy.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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