Relitigating the 2016 Election: Hillary Still Fit To Serve Even If She’s Sick
Note: This story originally ran on my blog on August 15, 2016.
2nd Note: “Relitigating the 2016 Election” is a series of the contemporaneous blog posts that I wrote in the lead up to the 2016 election. As these posts reflect my views at that time, they have not been updated.
The anti-Clinton whackjobs are at it again. This time they are suggesting that the soon-to-be sixty-nine-year-old Hillary Clinton is hiding serious health problems, health problems that make her unfit to serve as Commander-in-Chief.
The article, recently published on the rabidly pro-Trump website, Breitbart, quotes a Dr. Jane Orient, the head of an anti-abortion, anti-vaccination, AIDS denying medical association, as stating that Hillary Clinton may have suffered from a concussion, seizure, or even stroke after accidentally slipping in some stairs a few years back.
I could spend the rest of this post decrying the fact that Dr. Orient is violating ethical standards by diagnosing someone she doesn’t even know. Or I could start off a sustained rant against a system that allows someone who believes that abortions cause cancer to even practice medicine in the first place.
Instead, I will say that the (most likely groundless) concerns about Clinton’s health bespeaks a latent ageism in American society, an ageism that makes little sense in light of the fact that we’ve already had an elderly person serve as Commander-in-Chief. Ronald Reagan was weeks shy of his seventieth birthday when he was sworn in for the first time. Trump has already passed that milestone and Clinton will be less than a year away from it on Inauguration Day.
I also will say that Donald Trump, more than a year older than Hillary Clinton, eats McDonald’s on a regular basis and is raising a young child in old age, a known risk factor for poor health. He is also a man and men are notorious for not living as long as women do. Trump is more likely to die in office than Clinton.
Seeing that we have two elderly people who are running for office, a more relevant question would be, “Which of the two running mates can be trusted with the nuclear codes in the event of an untimely demise of the president?”
Mike Pence, the virulently homophobic governor of Indiana, signed a “religious freedom” bill that would have legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians by allowing business owners to cite religious objections. Pence is vehemently anti-choice, having signed some of the strictest restrictions on abortion into law. Pence also is indirectly responsible for the largest outbreak of HIV in Indiana history. As a US Representative, he co-sponsored a bill to eliminate birthright citizenship and he is not in favor of gun control.
By contrast, Tim Kaine, Clinton’s running mate, became bilingual in Spanish after serving as a missionary in South America and made a name for himself by winning housing discrimination cases in his adopted home state of Virginia. On the reproductive rights front, Kaine scrapped ineffective abstinence-only sex ed in Virginia and resisted calls to defund Planned Parenthood. Despite personal objections to abortion, Kaine has repeatedly stated that Roe V. Wade should not be overturned and his voting record backs up this claim. He also staunchly supported Obamacare despite its unpopularity with some of his constituents. He is in favor of gun control and is personally opposed to the death penalty.
While I would shed copious tears in the case of Clinton’s death, I wouldn’t lose one wink of sleep over a Kaine presidency. Kaine is imminently qualified to serve.
That being said, the American people should cast their votes for a sick Hillary and an apparently healthy Tim Kaine. The last thing we need are a healthy Trump and Pence serving a full term in The White House.
