On Monday’s The View, the panel opened by discussing Hillary Clinton’s health update this weekend that she’s been diagnosed with pneumonia, after her campaign repeatedly denied she was ill. Co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar came up with creative excuses to defend the campaign’s lack of transparency, by carefully avoiding the fact that they lied. Whoopi weirdly excused Clinton’s behavior as something everyone does: “People come to work with all kinds of stuff. Doctors say don’t go to work, people go to work anyway.”
After playing the clip showing Hillary Clinton struggling to get into a car on Sunday, Whoopi dismissed her illness as being overblown by critics.
WHOOPI: It’s like how we are. People come to work with all kinds of stuff. Doctors say don’t go to work, people go to work anyway.
Behar’s excuses took a different approach, claiming that illnesses shouldn’t preclude you from being president because past presidents had health issues.
BEHAR: If you think of history, some of the best presidents have had an illness. Lincoln had some kind of disease that made him very tall I believe. I can't think of the name of it. There was a disease he had. Someone will tell me later. John Kennedy had Addison's disease which is a very serious disease of the adrenal glands. Some people say that Reagan had [indiscernible] Alzheimer's during his second term. FDR was in a wheelchair, some of these are the best presidents, were sick.
After co-host Sara Haines suggested that if Clinton had been upfront about her illness as soon as she was diagnosed, maybe this would have blown over, Whoopi disagreed, suggesting that there was no pleasing Clinton’s critics.
WHOOPI: There's no way for her to win in this. There's no way for her to win.
She then fell back on her (and Baher’s) typical defense of Hillary: “We’ve all done it.”
WHOOPI: It's stuff that we all have done. We've all gone to work --
JEDEDIAH BILA: We're all not running for president.
WHOOPI: No, no, but you know,you if you say enough in a year, she's not healthy, she's not healthy, she’s not healthy, at some point she's not going to be healthy. It's just going--it's what happens. I don't think she's got heart issues. I don't think because we've already had people In office with issues but I think it's just this idea that we have been -- you know that there's something wrong because she coughs or she has had issues in the past, had an issue.
