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The Real Issue with Clinton’s Health?

Tom Toles
© Tom Toles

It is ironic that Trump can get so much milage out of questioning Hillary Clinton’s health. Not only is he older than Clinton, but Trump would be the oldest person ever to assume the presidency (heaven forbid), ever. Plus Donald Trump has been as secretive about his health as he has been about his tax returns. Not to mention the jokes that has passed off as letters from doctors attesting to his health (see the next post).

There is a long history of presidents hiding their health problems. FDR was in a wheelchair because he was paralyzed from the waist down, and hid it from the public! JFK was so sickly he ended up in the hospital when he was campaigning, and nobody knew it! When William Henry Harrison caught pneumonia nobody knew it, but he had the poor judgement to die from it, and then everybody found out. The truth is that presidents (and especially people on the campaign trail for president) get sick, just like everyone else does.

But in this age of the 24 hour news cycle, it is almost impossible to hide it.

But that doesn’t explain why the media seems to be so focused on it. People get pneumonia all the time. And they almost always recover from it quickly. Yes, pneumonia killed Harrison, but that was a long time ago. We’ve gotten better. Polio is also not the problem it was in FDR’s time.

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