If there was a special unemployment office for TV pundits and celebrities, what would it look like after CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, and MSNBC finished firing everyone who had speculated on Donald Trump’s mental health over the last 13 months? The welfare line would be a paradise for autograph seekers. Look over there, it’s Rachel Maddow! Hold on, here’s Anderson Cooper. No wait, look behind that bush over there. Is that George Stephanopoulos? Oh, we’re going to make a fortune on eBay!
In reality, though, the line outside that place would be just as nonexistent as the office itself, because no one has been fired for openly theorizing about Trump’s psychological state. Pundits like Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC have gone as far as to “diagnose” Trump with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, reducing the entire field of psychiatry down to a hobby you can practice in between commercial breaks without any formal training at all. And it’s just fine. Where Donald Trump begins, journalism ends. Go nuts, everyone.
Dr. Drew Pinsky, the host of HLN’s “Dr. Drew on Call,” apparently thought this loose approach to Donald Trump gave him the freedom to speculate on the health of his opponent, Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton. Classic mistake. Maybe Pinsky thought he would be in the clear because he made his comments not on HLN (a subsidiary of CNN), but on KABC’s “McIntyre in the Morning” show.
“What is going on with her health care?” Pinsky asked on August 17. “It’s bizarre. There ought to be some sort of standard for people that are going to lead the country or are going to be making these important decisions.”
Pinsky went on to say that aspects of Clinton’s health and medical care were worthy of further examination.
“There were two things that gravely concerned us,” he said. “When she hit her head [in a 2012 fall that led to a concussion], she had to wear these prism glasses when she came out. That is brain damage, and it’s affecting her balance. Now clearly, it hasn’t affected her cognition, but tell us a little more about that. That’s profound.
“And then number two,” he continued, “when they screened her for heart disease, again, they did an old-fashioned screen. It just seems like she’s getting care from somebody that she met in Arkansas when she was a kid, and you’ve got to wonder. It’s not so much that her health is a grave concern, it’s that the care she’s getting could make it a concern.”
Eight days later, CNN announced they were bringing Dr. Drew’s show to an abrupt conclusion. The network’s executive vice president said that he and Pinsky had “mutually agreed to air the final episode of his show on September 22.”
He did not specify a reason for the sudden cancellation.
HLN is going through a schedule shakeup; Nancy Grace’s long-running show will also be coming to an end and the network is bringing Ashleigh Banfield in for a new program in the near future, so the network has plausible deniability.
And hey, in a world where Obama’s $400 million Iranian down payment just happened to touch down in Tehran at the same time as the prisoner release…where Bill Clinton just happened to meet with Attorney General Loretta Lynch privately a few days before his wife was exonerated by the FBI…anything is possible. There’s no limit to the oddities of coincidence.
But to any other network stars who want to stay out of the Celebrity Unemployment Line, you might want to tread lightly when it comes to questioning Hillary Clinton. You know, just to be on the safe side.
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