Clinton Fainting Female Response Team Activates

The entire point of national politics is to hone an utterly false and misleading public persona and hope it sticks with a largely uninvolved electorate through the election. This feat was easier to accomplish in the days before cable news and later the Internet caused you to be on 24×7 talking points and tightly manage your shit. Candidates now have rapid response teams that don’t allow a negative story to fester for more than a millisecond before firing off a salvo of misleading flares and redirects designed to change the media conversation. The Clinton campaign has this dummy game of rapid fire telephone down to a near moronic science.

The problem with the Clinton fainting spell is that this is the first time in the election there’s actual tape on an incident. You can’t claim conspiratorial origins. Everybody’s seen Hillary Clinton drop like a wet noodle. Nobody’s ever seen a powerful Presidential contender take a nose dive before, not without being on the wrong end of a bullet. It’s jarring. The spin had to be equally bold. Whoever ignites the bullshit fuse shot it off big time at Clinton rapid response and entered a two prong strategy of inane story shaping. First, that Hillary Clinton is notably durable by the very fact she powered through pneumonia as far as she did before dropping. That went up the flagpole about half way before enough people took the time to really consider the proposition that fainting in a pant suit on a lightly warm morning can’t possibly indicate physical ruddiness. If pneumonia were a sign of strength, Sean Penn would be injecting the bacteria directly into his pulmonary organs.

Round two went straight to the feminist argument. Right to the goddamn base. All those Lena Dunham podcasts looking for payback. Newscasters, bloggers, and social media influencers, such as that’s a real thing, were informed to note that women are treated to a double standard when it comes to working while sick, being expected to hide their pain, and making sure everybody gets what they need in clear detriment to their own health and happiness. Within some ridiculously short amount of time, Vogue was pimping an article backed by money into search and social that explained just that:

In truth, Hillary Clinton got sick—with pneumonia, not the bubonic plague. But it’s not just media fatigue, or political jockeying, at play here; it’s also a healthy dash of sexism when it comes to women’s health. Think about it: No one likes to see, or even hear about, a woman suffering. They are expected to solider on, silently, no matter the circumstance.

Are we supposed to think about it or are your informal interjections merely a ruse to tell us how it is. Because I just thought about it and I don’t think anything you said is true. Think about it: you’ve broken six rules of journalism in a single paragraph. You’ll still only be paid seventy-two percent of all the male Clinton apologists.

While wives perhaps treat their husband kindly when they’re sick. In stark contrast, every male member of the tribe treats their hacking comrades like a sad little pussy with a sad little pussy cough. If Trump had taken ill, there is no way in hell anybody currently feverishly comparing Hillary Clinton’s face plant to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s suffragette activism would do anything but lampoon the red-faced fuck for taking a dive.

That’s how politics works. Politics like the ‘Yuri Andropov has a slight cold’ moment when Clinton hopped up on 5-Hours came outside for ten seconds to greet a little girl who somehow evaded Secret Service to rush up to her. She was missing the obvious floral bouquet. Andropov lasted fifteen months. You have to give Clinton maybe twenty four. This is going to be a long weekend at Bernie’s*

* I clearly stole this line from Matt.

_{Photo credit: Splash News}