ince the news media will accuse us of inventing conspiracy theories no matter
what we do, we might as well make up a good one. Here's my candidate: the real
Hillary Clinton is a robot. And so is Donald Trump. That, not our concerns about
the health of a possible future president, is what a conspiracy theory looks like.
But let's talk about robots for a second. The thing about robots is that they're unable to rise above their robot nature. Certainly, the robots we have today have no sense of humor. I doubt that any of the robot telemarketers that call us sixteen zillion times a day ever said to itself, “You know, today I'm just going to lie outside, stop annoying people, smell the roses, and read a book!”
Last Sunday the real Hillary collapsed and had to be dragged into her van. The Clinton campaign ascribed it to overheating, even though the temperature was only in the low 80s.
They claimed she has pneumonia, which suggests that somehow they put the human Hillary in by mistake. But her rapid recovery suggests that, in fact, her CPU fan had stopped working. Getting sick is a human thing to do. It now seems that it's the news media who were acting like robots, accepting uncritically the claim that her multiple coughing fits—the latest of which lasted over four minutes—were due to ‘allergies’ and any public concerns were mere “fringe extremist conspiracy theories.”
These days a conspiracy theory is defined as talking about whatever the news media are conspiring to cover up.
The whole thing has a faint Twilight Zone aura around it. Specifically, that Twilight Zone episode (Steel) set in 1974, which was way in the future, where robots were common and boxing was illegal.
Two guys had an old model of a robot called a B-2. They knew it was a little beat up, but it was their only chance to win. They loved it and they had high hopes for it because it was their ticket to riches.
The day before the fight, as they were adjusting its boxing arm, the B-2 broke a spring and a piece of its mechanism shot across the room with a loud ‘sproing’ sound. It was clearly in no condition to fight, but the owners were desperate, so one of them (Lee Marvin) volunteered to stand in for the robot.
He was up against a B-7, I think it was, and he got knocked out in the first round. His friend dragged him back to the waiting room where he collapsed on the floor, near death. Moral: it's cruel to put a human up against a superhuman machine.
It's painful to watch the Democrats pushing this poor middle-aged lady toward what must be the most stressful job on the planet. Her opponent is learning at a prodigious rate: he is no longer the bombastic, self-aggrandizing blowhard we saw during the debates. He has come out with intelligent, more or less consistent policies and a reasonable list of Supreme Court candidates. Whoever reprogrammed Trump did a pretty good job.
Hillary wants the job desperately, but she is in no condition to fight. As Rod Serling narrated:
This is the story of that scheduled six-round bout, more specifically the story of two men shortly to face that remorseless truth: that no law can be passed which will abolish cruelty or desperate need—nor, for that matter, blind animal courage.
But this is too cruel to watch. Press the robot's reset button, reboot it, give it a new spring or whatever it takes. Put the robot back in and get her out of the ring before it's too late.
