UPDATE (9.11.2016, 1:18 p.m.): Almost as if to spite her defenders who continue, in the style of Kevin Bacon in Animal House, to shout “Remain calm! All is well!” Sunday morning Clinton proceeded to faint at a 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York. Video taken at the scene shows Clinton propped against a traffic post along the curb of a street while her campaign van (the one which supposedly is outfitted with a wheelchair ramp) pulls up to whisk her away.

Clinton is then essentially dragged into the van by several handlers, apparently losing a shoe amid the shuffle.

The company line this time? No big deal; she just overheated and that’s why she had a case of the vapors.

It was no more than 80 degrees, with 39 percent humidity in New York at the time of the ceremony Sunday morning.

All of a sudden the question of Hillary’s health and the lack of honesty on the part of her camp with respect to same is no longer an issue for the political fringe — or so the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza deigns to tell us. We thank Cillizza for the license, and also for recognizing the considerable egg on his face after his own “All is well!” buffoonery earlier last week.

— Scott McKay

•••••

I published at my site earlier this week a post containing a video from a medical doctor who makes the case that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president and a narrow favorite, according to the polls, to win the election in November, is suffering from advanced-stage Parkinson’s Disease.

The case made in the video, by Dr. Ted Noel, an anesthesiologist from Orlando with 36 years’ experience in medicine, is a strong one. The various health-related issues which have pierced the cloak laid around Clinton the “short-circuits,” the coughing fits, of which there was one of alarming duration in Cleveland earlier this week that she attempted to play off by alleging an “allergic reaction” to Donald Trump, the hand tremors, the unusual nodding, the inability to climb stairs, the face-planting falls, the need for an aide to be handy with an auto-injector of the drug Diazepam, and others — are all consistent with Parkinson’s, according to Noel.

Clinton’s coughing fits are an especially telling sign Noel could be correct. From the website of actor Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s Foundation, some crucial information…

Difficulty swallowing, called dysphagia, can happen at any stage of Parkinson disease. Signs and symptoms can range from mild to severe and may include: difficulty swallowing certain foods or liquids, coughing or throat clearing during or after eating/drinking, and feeling as if food is getting stuck. As the disease progresses, swallowing can become severely compromised and food/liquid can get into the lungs, causing aspiration pneumonia. Aspiration pneumonia is the leading cause of death in PD.

It wasn’t just at that Labor Day event in Cleveland where Clinton had a pronounced coughing fit. Later Monday, when answering a media question about Trump and Russia on her campaign plane, it happened again, and this time the camera feed was cut as she departed the interview.

Noel isn’t the only medical doctor raising questions about Clinton’s physical fitness for the presidency; in fact, he isn’t by any means the most prominent. Dr. Drew Pinsky, the host of “Dr. Drew On Call” on HLN, offered serious concerns about her health in a guest spot on a Los Angeles radio show Aug. 17. Pinsky said he was “gravely concerned about not just her health but her health care,” referring to the prism glasses Clinton was seen wearing after the 2012 fall she suffered that led to a serious concussion. “That is brain damage, and it’s affecting her balance,” Pinsky said. “Now clearly, it hasn’t affected her cognition, but tell us a little more about that. That’s profound.”

The appearance was on “McIntyre in the Morning” on KABC radio, and the segment was pulled from the station’s online archive. The Washington Free Beacon preserved a transcript. And by August 26, CNN — HLN’s parent company — had announced Pinsky’s six-year run on their air would be ending on September 22. Which was unrelated to what he said on the radio, of course; CNN wouldn’t lie about that.

And it seems that being fired wasn’t the only consequence to Pinsky of offering a medical opinion as to Hillary’s health. According to the New York Post’s Page Six, CNN executives essentially made him an offer he couldn’t refuse to retract his comments — and he refused. Then came what were describes as “nasty” e-mails and phone calls Page Six’s source said were “downright creepy.”

Downright creepy is fairly standard fare for Clinton surrogates, but even the mainstream media has begun to take note of the hypersensitivity of the Clinton camp to the health questions. From the Hill…

“They’re trying to work the refs a little bit as they try to push back on the mainstream media’s willingness to pick up on some of this stuff that’s usually left to the fringes,” Clinton surrogate Jim Manley explained. The Drudge Report and other conservative media sites have largely driven the coverage of Clinton’s health, following the concussion she suffered in late 2012 and years before she announced her intention to run again for president. But Manley said the Democrat’s camp has seen the coverage “bleeding to the mainstream media” in recent weeks. After Trump insinuated recently that Clinton wasn’t healthy, the campaign responded forcefully, ripping Trump allies for concocting fake documents from Clinton’s doctor. “They’re trying to stop it,” Manley continued. “I think they learned a long time ago that you can’t just ignore these things. There’s always a fine line between react or not, but in this day in age, to say nothing is often not the best way to go.” Clinton aides and supporters see the healthcare stories as a bunch of baloney, and they want the media to cover it as such. One former Clinton aide called it a “complete farce, and the only way to handle it is to say in no uncertain terms that Donald Trump is full of it.” The former aide also agreed that the Clinton campaign wants to put pressure on the press. “I think that the fact that any mainstream publications would do anything but make this is a story about Donald Trump is completely out of the mainstream and why these claims have gotten worse,” the former aide said. “Some reporters have taken these claims at face value, and it’s the reason this story is still out there.”

No word yet on repercussions to Dr. Noel for his Parkinson’s video. Before those are launched, perhaps someone in Clinton’s camp can explain what her aide Josh Sullivan was doing researching Provigil, a drug often prescribed to treat narcolepsy and other sleep-related problems in Parkinson’s sufferers. We know Sullivan was doing that research because it turned up in one of Hillary’s e-mails that she tried so long to keep out of the public eye.

The possible fact that Clinton was wearing an earpiece during a candidate forum televised on MSNBC Wednesday night hardly offers confidence that she can fulfill her duties without extraordinary help — regardless of how many pickle jars she’s opening on late-night comedy TV.

The attacks on those questioning Clinton’s health tell us more than even the manifestations of her symptoms — of Parkinson’s or something else — have shown us.

Those attacks tell us that no matter what’s wrong with Clinton her camp will never come clean; three days after two protracted coughing fits captured on network TV they still refuse to offer a medical explanation of something which is clearly amiss, and instead they’re attacking people pointing out the obvious as kooks and conspiracy theorists.

And given the Clintons’ track record of lies and calumnies to cover illicit behavior as bad or worse than even the kookiest critics suggest, we’re perfectly in bounds to ask just how sick their candidate is.

A prediction: during this campaign or after the election we’re going to find out that yes, Hillary does have Parkinson’s Disease, and rather than recriminations about the blanket of lies and obfuscations her people have thrown over her infirmity we’ll be offered by Clinton’s media defenders a pottage of praise for Hillary’s heroism in persisting through her disease to pursue “public service” to America.

As Rush Limbaugh commonly says, don’t doubt me.