Our Viewpoint: Clinton’s health brings irrelevant questions to the light

If a senior citizen falls, what do you do? To Donald Trump, the answer is obvious. You accuse them of withholding information about their health and question their honesty.

Yes, Trump is at it again about Hillary Clinton’s health.

Clinton was forced to leave a 9/11 memorial service early when she began to feel faint. Video footage showed her stumbling as she waited for the approach of her van. A subsequent release from her campaign explained that the democratic nominee had pneumonia.

In an election year already rife with misogyny and double standards, Clinton’s illness was all the fodder the right needed to stir up drama.

Admittedly, Trump has been rather silent about Clinton’s recent health problems, saying only, according to The Huffington Post, “I don’t know, folks, you think Hillary would be able to stand up here for an hour and do this? I don’t know. I don’t think so,” after referring to the “hot” temperature in the room. Later on in the rally, he wished her good health and a speedy recovery, the Post reported.

But Trump hasn’t always been so silent. Early this month and late last month, Trump was viciously attacking Clinton, saying, according to The New York Times, she “lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS, and all the many adversaries we face.” At another rally, Trump accused Clinton of sleeping through the phone call about Benghazi.

However, Trump’s silence this week has been more than made up for by his fellow conservatives. According to The Huffington Post, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani blamed the media for not giving appropriate attention to valid questions about Clinton’s health, saying that the media,“fails to point out several signs of illness by her. All you’ve got to do is go online.”

Giuliani ran against Clinton in the presidential race of 2006, when he was still a short-term survivor of prostate cancer. According to GQ magazine, when he dropped out of the race because of health reasons, Clinton personally called him, saying of the call, “I certainly hope and pray, as I know all New Yorkers do, that he will have a full and speedy recovery.”

The left has stated their focus on Clinton and her health is based on their concern that she is not transparent enough, and the fact that she has a track record of dishonesty.

But Clinton is perhaps the most transparent publicly elected official of all. Trump, who still hasn’t released his tax returns, has been blatantly dishonest about his finances and the amount of wealth he has donated to charity, and is notorious for his flip-flopping on political issues; we still don’t know exactly how he’s going to build that wall.

We know almost everything about Clinton. In fact, we probably know more about Clinton’s personal and professional life than we know about Kim Kardashian’s…which is unfortunately a lot. We have her tax returns since 1977, millions of e-mail messages from her time as secretary of state and now have her medical records. What more do they want? Her social security number and birth certificate?

Others, including conservative talk show host Glenn Beck, have raised questions about how Clinton will handle the actual presidency if she can’t even handle the campaign trail.

Questions that raise even more questions are the fact that the president’s seat has been held by someone like FDR, who served during arguably one of the country’s darkest periods and suffered from a severe case of polio. His polio was so severe that he was paralyzed from the waist down and had to walk with iron braces. Yet, he pulled our country through The Great Depression and World War II.

So is Clinton really the feeble old woman the right has made her out to be?

The experts say no. According to The Telegraph, Clinton’s doctor, Lisa Bardack, issued her a clean bill of health and released medical records that state Clinton is a healthy 68-year-old woman with low cholesterol and someone who, like a lot of Americans, suffers from seasonal allergies.

The campaign trail is a brutal race to get to the most rallies, give the most press conferences, talk to the most locals, and most important of all, make the most people know you’re the best candidate for their interests. One can’t be surprised that the toll of it all has begun to wear on a 68-year-old with a lifetime of wear and tear from public appearance after public appearance.

Like a bully waiting for a reaction, the right will continue to find fault with everything that Clinton does simply because she is unlike anything they’ve ever experienced. Let’s stop talking about issues completely irrelevant to the betterment of our country and start talking about what really matters: policy.

Dakota Palmer is the voices editor for The Spectator. She can be reached at voices.spectator@gmail.com.