RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton’s health has become a campaign issue, not due to conspiracy theorists but based on troubling videos of her bizarre facial tics, difficulty ascending a set of stairs, lengthy coughing fits, and her collapse after the 9/11 anniversary commemoration in Manhattan. More recently, there is video showing Mrs. Clinton’s eyes not tracking together, crossing and misaligning.

As the focus of the campaign turns to Russian hacking, rigged elections, and sketchy polls, Mrs. Clinton’s health has moved off center stage. Yet it still a legitimate concern. Although she has not stumbled or had a public coughing fit, her nontracking eye movements continue to be apparent. Not to big media, which are far more interested in the latest Trump accuser, a porn star who just happens to be opening an online sex store. Yet her crossed eyes resurfaced most recently at a Cleveland campaign appearance a few days ago. The only thing missing is her campaign blaming the Russians.

What do these abnormal eye movements suggest about her neurologic health? In 2012 Mrs. Clinton fell, suffering a concussion and a brain hemorrhage requiring treatment with Coumadin, a potent blood thinning medication. More than simply a bump on her head, but instead “a terrible concussion that required six months of very serious work to get over” according to her husband Bill Clinton.

More specifically, she suffered a cerebral venous thrombosis, a large blood clot in her transverse venous sinus. These sinuses collect blood draining from the brain and can be injured via trauma or a variety of medical conditions which increase blood clotting tendencies.

As an aside, blood clots are not just a recent problem for Mrs. Clinton. She suffered a blood clot in 1998 when she was first lady, and only in her mid-50s. Typically blood clots at this age signify an underlying clotting disorder, likely a genetic defect in the clotting cascade. This might explain her subsequent problems a decade later. Her blood clot when she was first lady was only recently revealed, consistent with Mrs. Clinton’s penchant for secrecy and lack of transparency.

Late complications of cerebral venous thrombosis include speech impairment, difficulty with body movement, seizures, and altered vision, including double vision. Watching the many videos of Mrs. Clinton suggest that she has suffered all these complications.

Western women need Trump. Feminists need Trump, as distasteful as this might seem to them. Christians need Trump. Jews need Trump. LGBTs need Trump. This is not the time to fret about Trump’s personal weaknesses. It is the time to rely on his strengths and his policies.
I switched on a BBC World News program and found myself listening to a round-table debate among three women and two men. There was only one white man. I know he was white because of his appearance and because, inevitably, he was referred to as such at one point to emphasise his innate bias. I recalled the BBC debates of my youth with people like Malcolm Muggeridge. They were all (‘biased’ and oldish) white men in those days. The standard of debate was far higher and the provincial accents not so evident or jarring. Or, is that my nostalgia showing? Or, is it yet one more symptom of a civilisation in its death throes? Both I would say.

Britain is allowing in some refugee children who have been encamped in Calais. The only trouble, as the white man said, is that some of them look as though they are 25 years old and all are male. I think it was agreed that the border-control people should lift their game without arriving at the obvious conclusion that corruption of one kind or another must be afoot.

A story was told of a lady with two young children who had agreed to foster a refugee child but, instead, had found a hulking young man on her doorstep. Reportedly, she is afraid for her safety and for her children’s safety. Ho-hum! I kid you not, at one point, we were told that it isn’t the fault of male refugees that they treat women badly; it is the fault of their culture. They know no better. No mention of Islam. Ho-hum!

All agreed, as you would expect from the BBC, that Britain had a responsibility to take in refugee children – though, to be fair, the white man did plaintively refer to homeless British children requiring support too. Nothing to see there; let’s move on — and they did, to Donald Trump. He was introduced into the conversation by one of the women as the “orange monster”. What followed was furious agreement that Mr Trump was unspeakable. But that wasn’t the end of it. Sexism is alive and well in the US apparently.

According to another of the women, the fact that Trump would win easily if only men voted and that Hillary Clinton would win easily if only women voted, showed that men were prejudiced against a woman candidate. The objection raised to this line of reasoning was that many women had found themselves voted into high office in the US and elsewhere with the support of men. But the more obvious retort that sexism can cut both ways was not made.

But there I go again forgetting that sexism, and racism too, only runs one way. Women couldn’t possibly be expected to vote for a lecherous man. On the other hand, Mrs Clinton’s persecution of women ill-used by her husband is forgivable. Because she is a woman?

As an older white man, I have a gender-related view of the voting landscape in the US. It is not the spurious and sexist one proffered on the program. Women for many years have been more wedded to the Democratic Party and less to the Republicans than have men. Men, relatively speaking, are more plugged into politics and therefore more likely to be swayed one way or the other by policies than are women, whose political preferences are more stable.

Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta has responded to the WikiLeaks publication of his private emails by suggesting they were stolen by the Russians to elect Donald Trump. What he doesn’t like to talk about is the business he’s done with a Kremlin-backed investment firm and the lengths he’s gone to avoid scrutiny of this relationship.

“Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer and the Trump campaign have been urging the media to pay attention to Mr. Podesta’s Russian connection and perhaps they should. The story begins in 2011 when the solar energy startup Joule Unlimited announced that Mr. Podesta had been elected to its board of directors. In a company press release, Joule’s CEO at the time lauded Mr. Podesta’s “extensive experience within the US government and internationally as well.” No one claimed Mr. Podesta was a scientific expert, but the company’s founder expressed the hope that their new associate “can help Joule build the lasting relationships needed for long-term success.”
A former White House chief of staff for President Bill Clinton, Mr. Podesta at the time was running the Center for American Progress, which supported the Obama administration’s “Russian reset.” Mr. Podesta personally lauded the effort to “build a more constructive relationship” with Russia at a 2009 event hosted by his think tank.

Mr. Podesta certainly seems to have made the effort to build a business relationship. About eight months after Mr. Podesta joined Joule in 2011, an investment fund backed by the Russian government, Rusnano, announced plans to invest about $35 million in the company. Several months later, Joule announced that Rusnano Chairman Anatoly Chubais was joining its board of directors. Around the same time, Mr. Podesta joined Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

It’s not illegal to invest alongside a Kremlin-backed investment vehicle tasked with developing and acquiring valuable technology to benefit Russia. Nor, as far as we know, is it illegal to do so while simultaneously serving as an outside adviser to the U.S. secretary of state.

But Mr. Podesta may have been concerned about the attention this association might draw when he went back into government in early 2014 to serve as a counselor to President Obama. That’s when Mr. Podesta declared on his federal financial disclosure form that he had divested himself of his Joule holdings. CONTINUE AT SITE