SkepticalRaptor on The Daily Kos writes about those who are pushing the “medically unfit” rumor about Mrs. Clinton:
Who’s behind the medically unfit Hillary Clinton myth
According to the article in Breitbart, “The executive director of a physicians’ organization questions how the mainstream media can ignore signs of what could be a traumatic brain injury in the Democrat nominee for president.”
Wow, that sounds serious. And from someone who heads a “physicians’ organization.” That person must be running the American Medical Association. Or maybe they head the American Neurological Association, because they mentioned traumatic brain injury.
That would be no.
The person behind this trope is Dr. Jane Orient, who has some official position with the physician organization, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She is also the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JAPANDS), published by AAPS. The journal does not have an impact factor, and does not appear to be indexed in PubMed.
It’s a full on attack, which is to be expected on a progressive’s website – but not inappropriate, if the facts as presented are valid. They suggest Dr. Orient is operating outside of her specialty, possibly outside of ethics, and is part of an organization which is anti-vaccine, etc.
Given the same set of knowledge about biomed and the rumors about Mrs. Clinton, I would have taken a far different approach to writing about it – I’m not nakedly partisan, I just think Trump’s a disaster.
All that said, this is the sort of sniping at the Clintons that has been going on since the beginning of Mr. Clinton’s Administration, if not earlier. I recall sitting in a Mazda dealership’s service waiting area, reading an article out of REASON Magazine, my mouth literally hanging open as the article explicitly said that Bill Clinton, sitting President of the United States, was an emotionally damaged child, and was only operational in combination with Hillary. From someone who had personally examined Bill? No, no. Just from what they’d seen on TV.
From a magazine with the word reason in its name.
REASON mostly published interesting material, so that was part of the shock – this was pathetic, and also damn long – much longer than their average feature article. But I wonder how many readers just lapped it up, since I’m sure a substantial portion of the readership was rabidly conservative. How many understood the absurdity of publishing that article in a magazine named Reason – and how many just nodded and added it to their mythos?
I gave up on REASON shortly after Matt Welch took over as editor. While a good columnist, when he assumed the top editorial position the magazine became excruciating to read: deeply anti-Obama without using actual reason, and switching to columnists whose command of the art of writing was so bad that I couldn’t evaluate their facts or reasoning abilities. I don’t know if this was Matt’s fault, or the publisher, who for a long while was Robert Poole, a well known conservative engineer. In any case, with my marriage imminent, it seemed like a good resource-eater to be rid of.
