All in his head
Karl Rove stunned a conference when he suggested Hillary Clinton may have brain damage.
Onstage with Robert Gibbs and CBS correspondent and "Spies Against Armageddon" co-author Dan Raviv, Rove said Republicans should keep the Benghazi issue alive.
He said if Clinton runs for president, voters must be told what happened when she suffered a fall in December 2012.
The official diagnosis was a blood clot. Rove told the conference near LA Thursday, "Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that."- Emily Smith, "Karl Rove: Hillary may have brain damage",Time, May 12th, 2014.
The above came to my attention via Charlie Pierce at Esquire, who, I'm afraid, misses a very salient point: if anyone knows from brain damage in modern American politics, it's Karl Christian Rove. Of course in that regard, we have to note the equally obvious fact Mr. Rove seems to have overlooked: so far as we know, Ms. Clinton hasn't switched her party affiliation and remains the presumptive-per-the-pundits Democratic nominee for President.
I assume, however, that Mr. Rove's comments were a recruitment attempt. I mean, good gravy, if he's correct and Hillary Clinton suffered brain damage in 2012, that makes her--at the very, very least--GOP Vice Presidential material, right there. The GOP has been running cognitively disabled Vice-Presidential candidates for decades, at least as far back as Dan Quayle, possibly even as far back as Spiro Agnew. Heck, if they tapped Hillary Clinton for the Veep position, she wouldn't even be the first mentally-challenged woman they'd ever nominated.
Do we even need to mention how often it's suggested that everyday, ordinary American voters want a Presidential nominee who is "Just Like Them"? Someone who they could just have a beer with, that kind of thing? Intellectuals who run for higher office are encouraged to talk down to voters, to appear in ads in their shirtsleeves and smiling vapid smiles directly into a spotlight positioned directly over the photographer's left shoulder, to proffer platitudes about their faith and earnestness and how hard they worked. Both parties do this, of course, but it's an approach that seems more appealing to a group of Americans who deny global warming, think the Earth might well be only a few thousand years old, and who couldn't find Benghazi on Google Maps tho' they know it's the most important political scandal in the entire history of the Republic. So I'm thinking a candidate with a traumatic head injury is a shoo-in with this crowd, or ought to be. "Derrrrr--she's just like me!" Yes. Yes, she is.
I mean, hell, if Karl's on to something, at least Hillary would have an excuse.
Except, of course, she hasn't gone over. Suggesting, then, that Karl Rove is full of shit, a shocking proposition that couldn't possibly be true, could it? I mean, who would have thought, right?
Still, credit where credit's due: Clinton was in the hospital, albeit for three days and not thirty-nine. This makes Rove's insinuation at least tangentially related to factual things that actually happened, which is more than you can say for about nine-tenths of what Ms. Clinton's been accused of in the course of her political career. I mean, at least he's not accusing her of murder.
Well. Not today, anyway.
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