NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers' 9/11 and how it perked up when Hillary Clinton got sick. The revival of the wingnut trope that Hillary is too infirm to serve as President was almost as funny/sad as their pivot, once it was revealed that Clinton had pneumonia, to outrage that she had briefly concealed a temporary illness and thus made them all look like idiots. National Review's Rich Lowry, who earlier in the day had disputed Clinton's claims of dehydration ("It isn’t a particularly hot day in New York City today; in fact, it is gorgeous"), upon being informed of her illness sputtered:

Here’s hoping she gets well soon, but...

Ugh, that quick "but" says so much, doesn't it?

...1) not for the first time, a Clinton has made his or her supporters look silly -- they spent a lot of time and energy pooh-poohing the health concerns...

Sure, it was Hillary's people who looked silly.

...2) she was diagnosed on Friday -- when did she plan on letting everyone else know?

I wouldn't be surprised if she had loose stools sometime during her illness. Would Lowry like updates when these occur? Maybe they can send him samples. The rest of the brethren are doing what they can with it; the New York Post says her diagnosis "settles nothing" because OKAY BOYS BREAK OUT THE ALEX JONES SHIT AGAIN: "We hadn’t made much of Clinton’s long coughing fit last week, but that now seems more disturbing, too..."

I guess these days, fed as they have been on a diet of crap pseudo-news for decades, wingnuts are sufficiently addicted to conspiracy theories that they'll read something like that and go, "It's just like the black helicopters -- my friends told me they weren't real but then I saw that Transformers movie..." But are there enough of them to win a national election?

UPDATE. Rod Dreher brings the porch-biddy perspective: "A new angle. That poor woman." (Ha ha, oh please.) "Look at her, gone stiff. What on earth is wrong with her? Does pneumonia do that?" Earlier Dreher published one of his famous reader letters, in this case purportedly from a doctor:

It is with great consternation that I have seen and read physician evaluations of Mrs. Clinton in the news media. You should never make diagnoses like that without having the patient right in front of you...

All that being said – I am deeply concerned about this video.

It's like those "I never believed Reagan coins would cure my cancer until today" stories popular in wingnut media. Was Rod conned, or is he the con artist? Why not both?

UPDATE 2. That Dr. Vinnie Boombatz gets around! Like Dreher, Scott Johnson of Power Line also has an anonymous alleged doctor -- a "prominent internist" who, based on his study of YouTube videos, diagnoses possible "aspiration pneumonia," which is "commonly seen in neurological conditions like strokes and Parkinson’s disease" -- both, as it happens, popular wingnut conspiracy theories. Dr. Boombatz ends by saying "someone should demand full and immediate disclosure of her medical records... Every voter should know what’s at stake," which is a curiously stark political pitch -- but I suspect Dr. Boombatz had some assistance from his scribe.