Thursday
In recently hacked and then leaked e-mails, former Secretary of State Colin Powell was revealed to have confided to his successor Condoleezza Rice that the Congressional Benghazi investigations of Hillary Clinton were a “witch hunt.” Alexandra Petri of The Washington Post says the same thing about the right wing’s health accusations although in a more indirect way: she alludes to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
Petri is focused on the conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health, which have long been circulating and which, as her Washington Post centrist columnist Ruth Marcus has complained, actually are a coded way of saying that it takes someone with a man’s stamina to be president. It’s unfortunate that Clinton’s recent bout of walking pneumonia suddenly appeared to give credence to the wingnuts
Petri begins her column by mentioning all of the rumors that have been flying:
Let us suppose, for a moment, that everything we have ever heard about Hillary Clinton’s health is true.
She has had multiple strokes. Also, she has multiple sclerosis.
She depends upon a stool.
She has Parkinson’s. And HIV.
She might or might not have asthma.
She has one year left to live.
There are at least two so-called Hillary Clintons. One is a body double. Both wear adult diapers, which accounts for the shape of their garments, but they are not very subtle about it, so that many YouTube users were able to notice and comment.
She is constantly suffering from seizures, blackouts, falls and collapses.
She has unspecified heart trouble.
She has lupus.
Also, “there’s special needs there” (Rep. Louie Gohmert’s words, not mine) and the only way to help her is through the power of prayer.
(This is probably just one of the many pernicious side effects of taking an extraterrestrial as a lover.)
The fact that Donald Trump regularly cites some of these conspiracy theorists and has hired others that run their columns in their publications means that we can’t laugh them off quite as easily as we might have in other times.
And now, here are Petri’s allusions to Miller’s play:
If we really want to feel at ease about what is going on with Hillary Clinton’s health, as well as about those rumors that her glance can curdle milk, that the cat Socks was her long-term familiar, and that Trump looks the way he does because Clinton once looked at him with the Evil Eye and will not allow his virile member to return to him, there is only one approach to take.
We must test her correctly. She must be placed upon a ducking stool, then weighed against a sack of Bibles, and then we must hear Giles Corey’s testimony against her. We must learn: Does soaking a cake in her urine and feeding it to a dog cause her to cry out in pain? Does her body bear the Devil’s Teat? Does she mutter to herself? Did Abigail see her dance in the glen with the Lord Beelzebub, then fly off into the night with a loud cry?
To give you a taste of the judges, here’s the death pronouncement from Chief Judge Thomas Danforth in Miller’s play. We have been hearing a lot of his harshness and self-righteousness from Hillary’s accusers:
Now hear me, and beguile yourselves no more. I will not receive a single plea for pardon or postponement. Them that will not confess will hang. Twelve are already executed; the names of these seven are given out, and the village expects to see them die this morning. Postponement now speaks a floundering on my part; reprieve or pardon must cast doubt upon the guilt of them that died till now. While I speak God’s law, I will not crack its voice with whimpering. If retaliation is your fear, know this—I should hang ten thousand that dared to rise against the law, and an ocean of salt tears could not melt the resolution of the statutes.
Back to Clinton. Maybe her recent illness just proves that she’s human. Given the way she kept circling the globe as Secretary of State, how she stood up against relentless Congressional questioning for hour after hour, how she has campaigned relentlessly for months, we may have found ourselves thinking that she did indeed have supernatural powers. Instead we learned that (in the opinion of moderate conservative Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post) Hillary, as a woman, didn’t feel that she had the luxury of calling in sick and so tried to push through. And came up short.