Op-ed: The media has somehow confused “transparency” with medicine, and is treating Hillary Clinton like she is on her deathbed.
All because she kept her promise to attend the 9/11 memorial during a humid heatwave. "What happened yesterday [Sunday] was that I just was incredibly committed to being at the memorial -- as a senator on 9/11, this is incredibly personal to me." "I could feel how hot and humid it was. I felt overheated. I decided that I did need to leave. And as soon as I got into the air-conditioned van, I cooled off, I got some water, and very quickly, I felt better," she said. Hillary Clinton said Monday night she's "met a high standard of transparency" about her health and didn't think the pneumonia was "going to be that big a deal.” Clinton said she felt dizzy and lost her balance Sunday, but did not lose consciousness and is feeling much better, CNN said. She concedes she should not have gone. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Her doctor had told her on Friday that she had pneumonia, and even before the memorial she went to several campaign events. "I was supposed to rest five days -- that's what they told me on Friday -- and I didn't follow that very wise advice," Clinton told CNN's Anderson Cooper in a phone interview. "So I just want to get this over and done with and get back on the trail as soon as possible," she said. As for transparency she wants to know about Donald Trump’s health, and more than a few paragraphs from a hippy-looking doctor who did not examine him the day he wrote his medical report. Rachel Maddow and others reported exensively on the illnesses and collapses of former presidents, including George H. W. Bush. It couldn’t be hidden because he threw up while eating with the Japanese Prime Minister. Should the U.S. electorate have known that as World War 2 ended President Franklin Roosevelt had been told before he was elected for his last term that he would not live through it? His responses included driving 51 miles in an open car in a rainstorm in New York City. Winston Church suffered numerous injuries, including before and during wars. “He suffered a tooth abscess in 1941, a heart attack while staying at the White House just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of that year, and pneumonia in England in 1943, followed by “full-blown” pneumonia in Carthage. He had a severe stroke when prime minister in peacetime, in June 1953, and was off work until October,” reports “The Supreme Survivor” by A.W. Beasley. He was once even thrown from a camel. He was hit by a car in New York, and badly enough injured on his forehead and thighs to put him in hospital for a week in 1931. Pleurisy followed. He suffered serious illnesses while serving as prime minister after the war. President John F. Kennedy had back problems after his World War 2 service, and suffered from Addison’s Disease. Of the injections he was forced to take he said, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It works.” It took an assassin’s bullet to stop him. Would that qualify as “transparency,” there were reporters there. There are so many types of pneumonia it is absurd for anyone but Clinton’s doctor to make predictions. Millions of Americans are likely suffering mild pneumonia now, called “walking pneumonia.” “Sen. Charles E. Schumer was diagnosed with pneumonia a couple weeks ago, the New York Democrat’s office acknowledged Monday, a day after Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s staff said she had the common but dangerous lung infection – and five days after Schumer told reporters he had ‘a little bit of a cold.’ “Sen. Schumer had been diagnosed with pneumonia and, per doctors’ orders, he took antibiotics and kept a lighter schedule to recuperate,” Schumer’s spokesman, Jason Kaplan, said in a statement. “His doctor has given him a clean bill of health and he’s feeling better so he’s back to his usual schedule.” Lastly, as a 40-year journalist I am getting tired of the overuse of the word transparency. Time after time in my career if I had reported everything I learned, thinking my sources were being transparent, I would have been mistaken. Give news some time. Americans and Britons were well-served by keeping some things confidential. Imagine transparency in the Cold War? CNN New York Magazine Buffalo News
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 Op-ed: Before we try to figure out where our presidential race stands the question should be asked. Should be looking at polls or TV ratings? “The Democratic National Convention continues to be a bigger draw than its Republican counterpart, as nearly four-and-a-half-million more viewers have tuned in for primetime coverage of this week's dog and pony show,” said Ad Age. “Midway through the four-night event, the DNC is also besting the GOP confab in terms of the number of demographically desirable viewers it is reaching. Thus far, the DNC is averaging 7.9 million adults 25 to 54 years old per night, which translates to a 6.7 rating and represents a 39% lift versus the RNC's 5.68 million/4.8 rating.” The most stunning development this morning was that the Republican-leaning polling agency for the first time had Hillary Clinton leading. 538 pollster Nate Silver has said: “Rasmussen polls were the least accurate of the major pollsters in 2010, having an average error of 5.8 points and a pro-Republican bias of 3.9 points…” And Trump was still living down his associations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, even urging Putin on national television to steal more U.S. documents. These statements were being made as Putin’s jets were buzzing NATO and U.S. warships, and attacking Ukraine. He is accused of shooting down a Malaysian airliner with 298 people. British police accuse his government of killing a former agent with a special radiation syringe. Why won’t he release his taxes? Every president since Richard Nixon has, and Nixon was being audited and ultimatey forced out of office. Trump’s manager has close ties with the crook-dictator Ukraine kicked out who is now living in Russia. People are demanding to see Paul Manafort’s returns. President Obama, in a speech some pundits say was perhaps his finest ever, said of Putin: “We don’t look to be ruled.” "I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as President of the United States of America,” said Obama. It’s no longer a joke that Trump is “The Manchurian Candidate.” Both versions of the movie end with a drunken politician being used to take control of the U.S. for Russian being shot as he tries to assassinate the mostly likely presidential candidate. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has been a democrat, a republican and independent, and who pundits say is worth 100 times more money than Trump, said: “Throughout his career, Trump has left behind a well-documented record of bankruptcies, thousands of lawsuits, angry shareholders and contractors who feel cheated, and disillusioned customers who feel ripped off. Trump says he wants to run the nation like he's run his business. God help us. “I'm a New Yorker, and New Yorkers know a con when we see one! Trump says he'll punish manufacturers that move to Mexico or China, but the clothes he sells are made overseas in low-wage factories. He says he wants to put Americans back to work, but he games the U.S. visa system so he can hire temporary foreign workers at low wages. He says he wants to deport 11 million undocumented people, but he seems to have no problem in hiring them. Truth be told, the richest thing about Donald Trump is his hypocrisy.”  The message was on stickers throughout the hall in the city of Brotherly Love. “Love Trumps Hate.” Take that law and order president. It was almost like a Steven Spielberg movie. A series of speakers, including Michelle Obama and Bernie Sanders himself, explained why the former reality show host had ripped off people he worked with building towers which later went bankrupt. As if hearing it from Sanders himself, TV star Sarah Silverman, a Bernie supporter from day one, told those refusing to join the Hillary Clinton bandwagon “you’re being ridiculous.” Sanders said no one was more disappointed than he was, and he knew he had not been treated fairly, but the election of Donald Trump would destroy the country. Many did not buy it and shouted boos or even taped SILENCE signs over their mouths. Sanders endured booing on several occasions, no longer with the Secret Service to protect him. Ironically, Clinton carried California by 438,000 votes. No one in his right mind can believe that whatever dirty tricks the Democratic National Committee pulled, revealed in detail by Russia’s Putin and Wikileaks, Clinton stole California. The FBI is investigating alleged ties between Trump and Putin. Even right-wing media took offense. Speaker after speaker Monday talked about the millions who lost their houses and thousands who lost their loves because of the recession and wars created by President George W. Bush. Even this Tuesday morning media pundits were trying to keep the feud alive. Several networks sought out people who hated Clinton knowing they would not support Hillary. Ironically, nothing that was hacked two days before the convention began, was new. Sanders himself said Wikileaks didn’t say anything he had not already said. Nancy Pelosi, leader of the Democratic Party in the House, hinted on MSNBC this morning that many of the people on the street criticizing Hillary were being paid by Putin. Putin had accused Hillary of interfering in his last election. But none of the speakers Monday day came close to approaching the elegance of First Lady Michelle Obama, much beloved across party lines. "This “is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States. " “So, look, so don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on earth! And as my daughters prepare to set out into the world, I want a leader who is worthy of that truth, a leader who is worthy of my girls’ promise and all our kids’ promise, a leader who will be guided every day by the love and hope and impossibly big dreams that we all have for our children.” Speakers joked her speech was so strong it would be used in the next Republican convention, much as a previous Obama speech was used by Trump’s wife, Melania, in the Republican convention. Tuesday night will be another where love is the issue. The love of mothers whose children died in gun massacres. The Republican party and the NRA have consistently fought any effective gun control laws. They claim none would stop all shootings. Imagine if we eliminated laws against burglaries or bank robberies because some times the bad guys get away? That is the Trump mantra: Every man, hopefully carrying a gun, for himself. Military and intelligence leaders find Trump’s close ties with Putin terrifying. He is getting intel briefings, and he won’t have to use Wikileaks to pass on the information he gets. Trump’s funding threats to NATO are being cheered in Moscow.  The FBI is recommending no charges be filed against Hillary Clinton for maintaining a private email server, clearing the way for her become the first woman presidential nominee of the Democrat party.
FBI Director James B. Comey said Clinton had very careless, which could be said of most Americans who have had to learn now to use one new electronic practice after another. No one is arguing that her private email server was hacked by unfriendly powers, although some government servers have. Comey said no evidence of misconduct was found in the handling of classified mails. And previous secretary of states, including Colin Powell, had his own email. Many in private industry believe it would be safer to control their own email, rather than risk attacks by China, Russia and other. The Republicans will resume their attack on Clinton although it goes against their own basic philosophy that private industry can do a job better than the government. President Obama’s attempt to set up a health care website was a fiasco. After several terrorist attacks in the U.S. the government tried to force Apple to reveal the inner workings of an iPhone used by a terrorist. Apple refused, but another private company was able to do the job. The Clinton campaign said it was pleased with the decision made by "career officials" at the FBI. "As the Secretary has long said, it was a mistake to use her personal email and she would not do it again," said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon. "We are glad that this matter is now resolved." Republican nominee Donald Trump condemned the recommendation as expected. Yet the GOP now has lost both its marquee playing cards, Benghazi and the emails The real loser may be Bernie Sanders if he held any hopes that Clinton would be indicted and he would get the nomination by default, even though she had several million more votes than his campaign.
While Hillary and Bill were being hammered again for emails, little was being said about the Republican lawyer who turned their lives to hell.
Former special prosecutor Ken Starr, who subjected Bill Clinton to attacks Richard Nixon never faced, was in the news. This was a man who had defended the tobacco industry and was tight with Republican groups. Starr was never able to convict Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinski case or others, despite years of investigation. He could only make Clinton look bad. But Starr lost the presidency of Baylor University. Deadspin’s headline said: “Ken Star Faceplants When Confronted With Email Showing He Was Told About Rape At Baylor.” Nothing is more important than football at the Texas University. Let’s go back to the Clintons, and what created the unfavorable view many Americans have of them. Here is what the New York Times had to say: “By the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the dependably Republican Mr. Starr had built a prestigious career as an attorney, appellate judge and solicitor general under President George H. W. Bush. Then, in 1994, a congressional committee made Mr. Starr a special prosecutor to investigate the Clintons’ involvement in the Whitewater real estate venture and, juicier, the death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, a Clinton confidant. Mr. Starr aspired higher and wanted to go deeper. Soon, his brief had expanded to investigating the sex life of a young woman named Monica Lewinsky. Relying on covert recordings of her confessions, Mr. Starr’s report read at times like a steamy romance novel: “She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or he lifted her bra up; and he touched her breasts with his hands and mouth …” Alternet reported: “The righteous moralist who spearheaded the impeachment of Bill Clinton has ignored sexual assaults on his own campus.” It added: “Not to put too fine of a point on it, but Ken Starr is accused of ignoring sexual violence at Baylor University mostly because doing something about it would have jeopardized a cash cow. In his near six years as president of the school, Starr led an administration that law firm Pepper Hamilton concluded “as a whole failed” on every front to adequately address or attempt to investigate sexual assaults carried out by student athletes. Last week, the school’s Board of Regents issued a statement that it was “shocked and outraged” by the gross “mishandling of [sexual abuse] reports,” and announced it was firing head football coach Art Briles, sanctioning and placing on probation athletic director Ian McCaw and demoting Starr from president to chancellor. Days later, Starr announced he was stepping down from that role, but would continue to teach law at the institution.” In other words, though he accepted responsibility for rapes committed by athletes, he would keep his law professor job. Why are there no panels of pundits ripping him apart like they did when Bill Clinton had a brief chat with Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch?  For the first time ever, Americans will have the choice of a woman as their president. Hillary Clinton won’t have to worry about fighting off a challenge from Bernie Sanders based on technicalities.
Clinton won enough votes in the last Tuesday of primaries to prevent Sanders from arguing that she was counting on delegates picked by the party, not voters. Even Sanders’ dream of winning in California, the nation’s most populous state, failed. He had hoped that might give him leverage to take to the convention but he lost by more than 400,000 votes. But at the end it was a somewhat boring evening that cable television had been trying to make it seem like it would be decided at the last minute or perhaps not until the Democrat convention in July in Philadelphia. The New York Times reported Sanders had already begun laying off workers. Even his threat to keep his campaign going drew mostly yawns. He was under pressure from President Obama to withdraw and most pundits expected he would comply within days. Clinton, whose husband, Bill, served two terms as president, has been playing down the fact that she would be the first female president. On Tuesday night she let it all out. “Tonight’s victory is not about one person. It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible,” she said. “In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls, in 1848, when a small but determined group of women and men came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights,” she said in a speech in Brooklyn, N.Y. Many leaders around the world are likely to be happy to see her contesting Republican Donald Trump, who is considered too inexperienced to run the most powerful nation in the world. In her speech, she repeated an earlier comment, that the New York billionaire businessman was unfit to be president. “So we all owe so much to those who came before, and tonight belongs to all of you,” she added. She made special mention of her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham, who died in 2011. “I really wish my mother could be here tonight. I wish she could see what a wonderful mother Chelsea has become and could meet our beautiful granddaughter, Charlotte,” she said. “And of course, I wish she could see her daughter become the Democratic Party’s nominee.”  President Lyndon Johnson wanted to step up the war in Vietnam, and the U.S. Navy gave him exactly what he needed.
An alleged attack by the North Vietnamese Navy on Aug. 2. 1964 justified sending hundreds of thousands of American military to Vietnam. Questions were raised about what really happened and later historians determined the North Vietnamese had done nothing. Imagine what a President Donald Trump’s Tweet would have been like. “Commie North Vietnamese attack brave American sailors. Nuke them. Show them what real power is.” And it would probably have gotten the same reaction LBJ’s phony declaration did. Just this week shortly after an Egyptian Air Airbus crashed en route from Paris to Cairo a tweet was posted by Trump, or more likely one of his Twitter staff. CNN reported Trump said: "Looks like yet another terrorist attack. Airplane departed from Paris. When will we get tough, smart and vigilant? Great hate and sickness!" Hillary Clinton waited six more hours before saying the Egyptian government feared it was a terrorist attack. “It does appear that it was an act of terrorism — exactly how, of course, the investigation will have to determine,” Clinton told CNN. President Obama made no immediate statement, though his spokesman said the U.S. would provide any help it could. American TV media met to praise Trump, including Chris Matthews, perhaps the most popular MSNBC anchor. They said that even though there was no information to back up his claim he showed his willingness to say what people are thinking. How things have changed in 50 years. We used to fear “the finger on the button would be German…” That lyric appeared in a song, the “MLF Lullaby by Tom Lehrer, after the creation of NATO. Now the fear is that the button-pushing finger will be a reality TV show host who has never served in the military, not even in government. He dodged the draft during the Vietnam War to spend time with girl playthings while married. |
