Mediaboss Marketing

Much in the way "birthers" (Trump was among the most prominent) sought similar ends by questioning President Barack Obama's citizenship, the "healthers" are using junk science and conspiracy theories to argue that Clinton is suffering from a series of debilitating brain injuries.

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday" this weekend, former New York City mayor and Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani first accused the mainstream media of hiding evidence, then encouraged doubters to "go online and put down 'Hillary Clinton illness.'"

"I don't know why they are saying this," she said. "I think on the one hand, it is part of the wacky strategy, just say all these crazy things and maybe you can get some people to believe you."

But for those who want to believe, the structure of the lie borders on impenetrable -- baked into its "medical" assertions is the tightly held belief that the press is in cahoots with Clinton, protecting her political prospects by working overtime to hide her imagined ailment.

The facts, though, tell a very different story. This is it.

In a bit of dark irony, Clinton's political opponents then, most notably the Republican former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, suggested that Clinton was faking it -- that the secretary of state, as Bolton put it, had come down with a "diplomatic illness" in order to avoid the congressional inquiry.

In May 2014, more than a year after Clinton left the State Department, Republican strategist Karl Rove made headlines by suggesting Clinton had suffered brain damage in 2012.

"(Clinton) had follow-up testing in 2013, which revealed complete resolution of the effects of the concussion as well as total dissolution of the thrombosis," Bardack wrote. "Mrs. Clinton also tested negative for all clotting disorders."

The rumors have traveled with remarkable speed through the pipeline connecting small conservative and right-wing blogs to larger outlets like Breitbart, Infowars and Fox News.

First, there was the muffin shop.

"After the exchange," Lerer wrote, "(Clinton) took a few more photos, exited the shop and greeted supporters waiting outside."

End of story? Not quite.

More than a month later, pro-Trump blogger Jim Hoft picked up the video and, on his Gateway Pundit site, ran a headline blaring, "Wow! Did Hillary Clinton Just Suffer a Seizure on Camera?" She had not, of course, as had been clear to everyone present. But the video soon went viral. Less than a week later, after Clinton delivered her convention address, he was back at it, publishing a GIF of the nominee's amused face (there were a lot of balloons falling) under a similar title: "Wow! Media Missed This=> Did Hillary Suffer Another Seizure After Her DNC Speech?"

In the coming days and weeks, conservative media and the Trump campaign itself began to pick up the thread. Fox News host Sean Hannity, an unabashed supporter of the GOP nominee, dove in with particular gusto, gathering panels of "experts" to examine video clips of Clinton coughing and, again, batting her head at the D.C. muffin shop.

None of the physicians convened by Hannity had examined Clinton and at least one, Fox News medical correspondent Dr. David Samadi, is a urologist. When an actual neurologist, Dr. Fiona Gupta, joined the group, she mostly dismissed Hannity's questions, saying, "It's just so hard to speculate based on snippets (of video)."

When he pressed on ("It almost seems seizure-esque to me"), another Fox News contributor, Dr. Marc Siegel, an internist, pushed back.

"Well I'm not a neurologist," Siegel said, "and I don't think that necessarily looks like a seizure."

At around the same time Hannity was hosting his panels, a blog called the American Mirror and the Drudge Report gave a boost to a photograph that had been floating around for months. Taken back in February, the image shows Clinton being helped up a flight of stairs outside a halfway house in in North Charleston, South Carolina.

"The questionable health condition of Hillary Clinton should be a major issue of the 2016 campaign," the American Mirror post begins. "The latest evidence comes in the form of Clinton being helped up a set of stairs by multiple individuals outside what appears to be a home."

It reads: "Democratic Presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton slips as she walks up the stairs into the non-profit SC Strong, a 2 year residential facility that helps former felons, substance abusers, and homeless move into self-sufficiency."

As the conspiracy theories took flight, boosted by Trump's repeated assertions that Clinton is too chronically tired or weak to handle the White House workload, "questions" from right-wing bloggers and gadflies about Clinton's security detail began to focus in on a single piece of equipment carried by one agent.

On Twitter and on assorted blogs, conspiracy theorists began to focus on images they believed to show, as one headline put it, "Hillary's Handler Carrying Auto-Injector Syringe For Anti-Seizure Drug Diazepam."

But again, this was simply not the case. Hannity broadcast the story to his millions of viewers, citing the Gateway Pundit and its sources, with no evidence of his own.

Indeed, the Secret Service has weighed in repeatedly when asked. On Monday morning, spokeswoman Nicole Mainor dismissed the report in an email to CNN.

"The item in the Detail Leader's hand is a flashlight," she said.

Breitbart News has been a house organ for Trump since the early days of his run, but the union became more formal last week when the media company's executive chairman, Steve Bannon, was hired as campaign CEO.

All this as Drudge doubled down by bannering its site with an absurd Heat Street post, titled, "MUST SEE: Photos of Hillary Clinton Propped Up on Pillows." The images, with arrows superimposed to point out the pillows, show Clinton -- fully alert, engaged, sometimes addressing large audiences -- in the presence of small pillows that she sometimes placed behind her back when she was seated.

"With all due respect to television doctors, when you have a doctor who has never seen the patient begin to give you a complicated, fancy-sounding analysis based on what?" Gingrich said.

"I mean, I would be very cautious and I would recommend to doctors for professional reasons to be very cautious deciding you're going to start analyzing people."

See more here:
Hillary Clinton health: Debunking the conspiracy theories ...

Hillary Clinton took on two controversial topics in an interview on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" on Monday.

First, Kimmel quizzed the Democratic presidential candidate about news that broke earlier in the day of the release of additional emails from the time she served as secretary of state.

"The State Department said that they have to release 15,000 emails by the deadline is a couple of days before the debate," Kimmel said. "Are you concerned about that?"

"No," Clinton responded. "Jimmy, my emails are so boring. And I'm embarrassed about that. They're so boring. So we've already released, I don't know, 30,000 plus, so what's a few more?"

When he asked her about the rumors swirling about her health, she offered him her hand and said, "Take my pulse."

Kimmel agreed as Clinton said, "To make sure I'm alive." He took her hand and gasped, telling the audience, "Oh, my God, there's nothing there."

She played off his words, implying that the stories are baseless. "With every breath I take, I feel like it's a new lease on life," she quipped sarcastically.

Last week during a speech about terrorism, Donald Trump said Clinton "lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on" ISIS. He also went after the length of her speeches, saying she would rather "go back home and go to sleep."

Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani continued that attack on Fox News Sunday when he told the audience, "Go online and put down 'Hillary Clinton illness' and take a look at the videos for yourself."

Clinton called the Republican nominee's health attack a "wacky strategy" and chalked it up to the "crazy things" said by Trump and his allies.

"It absolutely makes no sense," she said. "I don't go around questioning Donald Trump's health. I mean, as far as I can tell, he's as healthy as a horse."

At one point during the interview, Kimmel asked Clinton to open a jar of pickles to prove how healthy she is.

The two also discussed how she was preparing to debate Trump.

Clinton told the late-night host, "I'm planning on drawing off my experiences from elementary school."

Visit link:
Hillary Clinton Tells Jimmy Kimmel She's 'Embarrassed' by ...

She is not planning on sitting for another televised armchair confessional to rehash regrets about a private email server. Nor is the campaign setting up the kind of war room employed last year to discredit a book that aimed to expose a quid-pro-quo relationship between Clinton Foundation donors and State Department officials.

With 75 days until Election Day and new emails once again casting a pall over her campaign, Hillary Clinton aims to run out the clock, confidants say, on the latest chapters of the overlapping controversies that have dogged her campaign since the start.

Story Continued Below

According to allies and operatives close to the campaign, Clintons team thinks they can ride out any negative reaction to a set of new emails that show Clinton Foundation officials trying to set up State Department meetings for donors during her tenure as the nation's top diplomat.

That doesnt mean no response, one Clinton team insider said, but a muted one rather than a five-alarm fire.

It's a strategy borne, in part, of a belief held deeply by Clinton herself that the email controversy is a fake scandal and that voters are as sick of it as the candidate herself and by the profound weaknesses of Clinton's opponent.

In the campaigns view, the emails that surfaced this week do not advance the foundation storyline; while emails obtained by the conservative group Judicial Watch shed light on the open line of communication between Clintons top aides and foundation officials, there is no proof positive that donors received special access or treatment from the government.

Plus, the campaign thinks Clintons commanding lead over Donald Trump in both national and battleground state polls gives her freedom to not comment indeed, largely ignore the disclosure this week that the FBI found nearly 15,000 new emails Clinton did not voluntarily hand over to the State Department last year.

While those emails could be released to the public as early as October, Clinton allies predicted that the State departments tedious review process means the release is more likely to affect a Clinton reelection campaign in 2020 than derail her this fall.

Its going to be there forever, said Clinton ally James Carville of the email controversy, holding that there was nothing new for the candidate or her campaign to add to the discussion. They should go about their business, he advised.

Clintons more pressing concern, her donors said, is raising money for the expensive ground organization she will need to deliver a win. On Tuesday, she ignored the new chapters of her old controversies while attending a star-studded fundraiser at Justin Timberlakes mansion in Los Angeles, followed by a pair of big-money events in Laguna Beach.

Some Democrats, including close Clinton allies, have started to warn that their nominee might be underestimating the danger lurking in the fall as Trump and Republicans prepare to launch negative ads on these twin controversies and remind American voters just how little they trust the former secretary of state. Their best hope is that Trump continues to veer wildly off script.

Clinton remains, as one ally described, as decidedly and defiantly puritan as she was 17 months ago that the email investigation is nothing more than a partisan attack. Close allies characterize her as frustrated by the ongoing focus on the issue of her email server because she still fundamentally believes she did nothing to bend the rules. She is also resentful that Trump is only trailing by single digits in national polls when she thinks there is no comparison between her baggage and his and that a Clintonian double standard is at play.

Theyre in a box, lamented one Clinton ally. Its an issue that wont go away, no matter what they say. Nobodys happy about it.

Because of Clinton's core belief that she did nothing wrong, allies no longer believe the Democratic nominee is her own best spokeswoman on the email issue. In July, Clinton was still tripping over questions that the campaign had hoped were finally behind it after FBI Director James Comey said he would not recommend criminal charges. Clinton told Fox News Chris Wallace that Comey said her answers to the public were truthful, when he made no such statement.

I may have short-circuited it, Clinton explained during an appearance in front of black and Hispanic journalists earlier this month, a soundbite Trump has subsequently employed to question her mental capacity to be president.

On Monday, Trump called for a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton's emails a request that evokes the memory of Ken Starr and the investigations of Bill Clintons White House that began with Whitewater and ended with Monica Lewinsky.

But Bill Clinton allies on Tuesday were more upset about the decision to downsize the philanthropic organization to a fraction of its current size and remove the former president from his fundraising role and board position.

Why did no one care that Bob Dole was majority leader and his wife ran the Red Cross? said Carville, blaming the extreme downsizing on public pressure and a double standard for anything Clinton-related. Every columnist can take a great victory lap, he fumed. I will lay back and mourn for those who will die because theyre not going to get the vaccines they need. I guess at some point, politically, it probably makes sense but Im embarrassed to be around my children for saying they should do this.

But inside Hillary Clintons camp, the team is unwilling to engage more forcefully or offensively without evidence that the new emails and new foundation allegations are hurting her.

Indeed, without new information and barring a dramatic improvement in Trumps numbers, the Clinton team thinks it would be a mistake for the candidate or her surrogates to respond.

One source close to the campaign said Clinton officials want to see if the Republicans overplay their hand while hammering Clinton on an issue that close to two-thirds of voters, according to a Monmouth University poll, said they were sick of hearing about last year.

Theres a chance that Trump gets better, and that some sort of mythical new information comes out of the emails, said Mo Elleithee, director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and a veteran of Clintons 2008 campaign. But in the absence of that, the Clinton people seem to be content with keeping their heads down, letting her deliver her positive case and allowing Trump to continue to cloud the national conversation with his own unforced errors.

A Clinton campaign spokesman declined to comment.

Read the original post:
Hillary Clintons run-out-the-clock strategy - POLITICO

Hillary Clintons ongoing health issues are serious, TVs Dr. Drew claims, and he is gravely concerned!

The media personality gave his expert opinion on morning radio show McIntyre in the Morningthis week.

Dr. Drew said he and a colleague, Dr. Robert Huizenga, analyzed Clintons medical records and revealed, Both of us concluded that if we were providing the care she was receiving, we would be ashamed to show up in a doctors lounge.

PHOTOS: 10 Shocking Revelations From Hillary Clintons Latest Email Leak

He added, We would be laughed out. Shes receiving sort of 1950s-level care by our evaluation.

The doctor, who is board-certified in both internal and addiction medicine, said, Based on the information that she has provided and her doctors have provided, we were gravely concerned not just about her health, but her health care.

Clintons health has been a serious issue throughout her 2016 presidential campaign, from frequent coughing fits, to constant falling, to unexpected weight gain and more.

PHOTOS: J Lo, Leo, Housewives & More! The Stars Turn Out For Hillary Clinton Fundraiser

But even more disturbingly, Dr. Drew said Clinton is on old-fashioned medications to treat her conditions.

We took a look at her record, he said. And here are the basic facts. She had two episodes of whats called Deep-Venous Thrombosis. Common problem. Blood clots in the leg. She also has hypothyroidism, and shed been treated for hypothyroidism with something called Armour Thyroid, which is very unconventional and something that we used to use back in the 60s. And both he and I went, Hmmm, thats weird. And by the way, wow, Armour Thyroid sometimes has some weird side effects.

Dr. Drew said brain damage could be affecting her balance. And he claimed that when Clintons doctors checked her for heart disease, they did an old-fashioned screen.

PHOTOS:Erratic & Violent: Clinton Terrorized White House Staff, Says Secret Service Agent

He said, it just seems like shes getting care from somebody that she met in Arkansas when she was a kid!

Read more:

Dr. Drew Claims Hillary Clinton's Health Issues Are 'Serious ...

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER KABCs Dr. Drew Pinsky said hes gravely concerned about the health care Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is receiving during a radio interview with Doug McIntyre on Tuesday.

Im very concerned about people journalists and people with no medical training even discussing these issues. They need to bring physicians in, Dr. Drew explained on Tuesday, commenting on the recent speculation around Clintons health after photographs surfaced of her receiving help up stairs.

Clintons health has been a subject in the news for many years.

Dr. Drew recentlyhad a fellow doctor join his radio show, KABCs Midday Live airing weekdaysat noon,to reviewClintons health records, which she made available on her campaign website months ago.

The fact is, she released her medical records some time ago,Dr. Drew stated, adding,based on the information that she has provided and her doctors have provided, we were gravely concerned not just about her health, but her health care.

Both of us concluded that if wewere providingthe care she was receiving, we would be ashamed to show up in a doctorslounge, Dr. Drew concluded. We would be laughed out. Shes receiving sort of 1950s level care by our evaluation.

Dr. Drew said Clintons medicaltreatment has been unconventional and out of date, adding that its concerning.

It just seems like shes getting care from somebody that she met in Arkansaswhen she was a kid, he added.

Dr. Drews full analysis can be heard at 790KABC.com.

Follow this link:

he was gravely concerned about Hillary Clintons health