It has forever been perfectly fair game in prudent political discourse to demand that politicians seeking higher office reveal information about their physical fitness.
Everyone remembers when Democrats and the press tried making an issue out of Ronald Reagan’s advanced age and health in 1984.
“I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Reagan responded with charming indignation during the presidential debate. “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
Walter Mondale, who would go on to lose 49 states to Reagan, had no option but to laugh along with the rest of the world at the instant immolation of his campaign.
Three decades on and billions of dollars spent drawing mental health issues out of the shadows and into the daylight of polite public discourse, it seems only just and fitting that American voters be equally informed about the mental fitness of our politicians seeking higher office.
And what head doctor worth his weight in cigarettes and Zoloft wouldn’t just love to get former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on the couch?
To be sure, she would be one tough nut to crack. This is a woman who makes Lady Macbeth seem weak and unimaginative. By comparison, Blanche DeBois is laid back and easygoing.
Think of all the issues you could explore!
Hillary Clinton’s husband and the father of her child — a man who is also the most powerful man in the world — sodomizes a lowly intern who is just a few years older than their daughter. So, according to intimate friend Diane Blair, Mrs. Clinton accuses the intern of being a “narcissistic loony toon.”
That is what professionals call “transference.”
And then there’s this: “She thinks she was not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of her own concerns and struggles to realize the price he was paying,” Blair wrote of Mrs. Clinton. This is called being an “enabler.” More specifically, an “enabler” of a dirty, lying horndog husband who cut a disgraceful figure both for the young, passionate intern working for him and for his own daughter.
Even Tammy Wynette with her mouth full of home-baked cookies could tell you that.
Now, knowing the extent of mental torture Mrs. Clinton was suffering while in the White House explains some of her erratic behavior and chronic public dissembling ever since.
She shows clear signs of paranoia, dating back to her frantic wheezings over the “vast right-wing conspiracy” she said was haunting the White House. She didn’t say this specifically, but her being on familiar terms with the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt would make it interesting to ask her whether these apparitions included ghosts of Ronald Reagan or maybe Theodore Roosevelt.
This paranoia and imagined correspondence with the paranormal reached a fevered pitch during her 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination for president when she recalled how she perilously came under sniper fire landing in Bosnia during her husband’s second term. Her handlers begrudgingly acknowledged Mrs. Clinton’s psycho-wackery only when confronted with pictures showing her actually accepting flowers from a little girl on the tarmac.
This condition easily bleeds into delusions of grandeur, such as when she aired a television ad during that same campaign announcing that she alone was qualified to answer the White House “red phone” at 3 a.m. bringing news of a pressing national security disaster.
Of course, it is still debatable which one of the two candidates left in the race at that time is more of an international laughingstock, but the terrorist attack in Benghazi proved that Mrs. Clinton certainly wasn’t up to the task.
After months of dodging, evasions, and doctors’ visits, Mrs. Clinton finally lashed out in public about the attack. “What difference at this point does it make!” she bellowed at her interlocutors.
Well, the families of the four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, would like clear answers and closure. They would like to know why Mrs. Clinton and the White House were far more interested in immediately covering up their handling of the attack than protecting American property and personnel in the first place.
This inability to relate to the pain felt by those around her is a frequent sign of varying degrees of psychosis.
In any event, it was an awkward MRI moment that should have gotten the former first lady checked into a rubber room for further evaluation.
And, if she really wants to be president, the American people have a right to know what the results of that MRI showed.
Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com and on Twitter @charleshurt.