FROM CHRIS CILIZZA, WHO JUST LAST WEEK WAS TELLING US TO QUIT WORRYING ABOUT HILLARY’S HEALTH: Hillary Clinton’s health just became a real issue in the presidential campaign. “Hillary Clinton falling ill Sunday morning at a memorial service on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks will catapult questions about her health from the ranks of conservative conspiracy theory to perhaps the central debate in the presidential race over the coming days. . . . This is, yet again, the Clinton campaign asking everyone to just trust it. She got overheated! But she’s fine now!”

“Conspiracy theory?”

UPDATE: Scott Adams on the optics: “If humans were rational creatures, the time and place of Clinton’s ‘overheating’ wouldn’t matter at all. But when it comes to American psychology, there is no more powerful symbol of terrorism and fear than 9-11 . When a would-be Commander-in-Chief withers – literally – in front of our most emotional reminder of an attack on the homeland, we feel unsafe. And safety is our first priority.”

I’m seeing enough Dem pundits running with this as suddenly being a big story that I wonder if they’re looking for an excuse to dump her for someone who might beat Trump easily.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1221.

THIS ISN’T THE 21st CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: Fat Activist Lindy West Body Shames ‘Based Mom’ Christina Hoff Sommers.

LET’S HOPE IT WAS JUST ONE TOO MANY MIMOSAS AT BRUNCH:

UPDATE: CBS News reports the pool of reporters who travel with Clinton “are being penned in at 9/11 memorial, not informed of her current whereabouts.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hillary Clinton reportedly has ‘medical episode’ at 9/11 ceremony.

The 68-year-old Democratic nominee appeared to faint shortly before 10 a.m. as family members of the 2,977 victims were reading through their names, and minutes before a moment of silence at 9:58 a.m. commemorating the collapse of the South Tower, sources told The Post.

A witness said the former Secretary of State’s knees buckled and she lost a shoe as her security team rushed her to a nearby van.

Clinton left the event so abruptly that she even left behind the pool of reporters assigned to follow her.

But remember, the people who have been raising questions about her health are racist, sexist conspiracy theorists.

MORE: Now they’re saying she was “overheated.” At 9 am in September in New York, with a temperature in the 70s?

Meanwhile, CNN is looking kind of sickly, too.

Flashback: HuffPost Fires Contributor, Deletes Articles Questioning Hillary’s Health.

STILL MORE: Video of Hillary being carried, falling.

Hillary Clinton 9/11 NYC pic.twitter.com/q9YnsjTxss

— Zdenek Gazda (@zgazda66) September 11, 2016

MORE STILL: This enlarged view via stumble-and-fall experts at The Old Row shows Hillary trying to step forward and starting to fall twice before sturdy men (Secret Service agents, I presume) take her by both arms, but she still collapses (almost taking them down, too) and is held up by them as she gets into the van. This is more than a “stumble.”

When you try to roll to Chili's with the squad after Gameday still shitfaced. pic.twitter.com/Pd3AQcJksH

— Old Row (@OldRowOfficial) September 11, 2016

But yeah, if you’re raising concerns about her health, it’s because you’re a racist, misogynistic conspiracy theorist.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: It’s Kim Jong-un’s World; We’re Just Living In It. We don’t live in the world the “liberal internationalists” have imagined exists; we live in a world where, more and more, the law of the jungle applies.

News that North Korea has detonated another bomb comes as no surprise; few things are as obvious in this crazy world as the fact that this murderous dictatorship is making steady progress on its weapons program. The Norks are getting better and better at making more powerful bombs and longer range missiles to put them on. President Obama, like Presidents Clinton and Bush before him, sputters indignantly and wrings his hands, but the tick-tock tick-tock of North Korean nuclear build-up goes on.

This tells us many things. It tells us that the security situation is going to continue to deteriorate in East Asia. It tells us that China has resigned itself to an era of confrontation with Japan. It tells us that both South Korea and Japan are losing confidence in America’s will and ability to do anything serious about the scariest security problem they face.

Beyond that, it’s a harsh reminder that, despite the illusions and the optimism of the liberal internationalists among us, the world still runs much the same way it did one hundred years ago. When hard power fails, all the UN Declarations of Human Rights, all the Security Council resolutions, all the noble speeches about the “international community” are just so much hot air.

Kim Jong-un is getting away with a nuclear build-up and a murderous dictatorship because he can. In theory, the world’s great powers have the ability to stop him. In practice, they are too divided, too busy knifing each other in the back, to cooperate against even a very small and poor country. China won’t cooperate with the United States to stop North Korea because the government in Beijing doesn’t think it is in its national interest to do so. The United States can’t compel China to change its mind about its Korea policy because we lack the strength.

Syrian refugees understand what kind of world we live in; so do the starving people of Aleppo. The victims of Boko Haram, now faced with a famine, get it, too.

Life in the era of Hope And Change.

FROM CANNED FOODS TO BANNING THE BIG GULP: A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, a new book by left-leaning authors Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe is reviewed by Joseph Bottum at the Washington Free Beacon, and compared to Amity Shlaes’ landmark 2007 revisionist history of FDR’s Great Depression, The Forgotten Man:

Shlaes’s book appeared during another economic downturn, within shouting distance of the election that would give us President Obama, and whether it was attacked or praised seemed mostly to depend on the politics of the reviewer. In the midst of a belated but particularly angry review of the book in 2009, the journalist Jonathan Chait insisted that “the real point” of The Forgotten Man was “to recreate the political mythology of the period.” And Chait was at least right that Shlaes had a profoundly revisionist goal in mind. She wanted us to rethink the New Deal’s responses to the Depression—and the way the essential rightness of the New Deal has become the standard history, the political mythology, of the era.

What Amity Shlaes doesn’t quite explain, however, is why the nation reacted so strongly to the Depression, electing Roosevelt to four terms in office despite the history of an unsolved economic crisis that she relates. For that, we need an even more revisionist account.

Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe’s A Square Meal gives us, in some ways, a small case study of the New Deal that Shlaes pictures: a set of governmental interventions that both failed to solve an immediate problem and created future problems. Even more, however, A Square Meal offers an explanation for why the nation responded to the Depression with such intense support for the changes of the New Deal. Down at its root, economics always has something to do with food—and the fact of hunger, in a nation that had believed itself the land of plenty, seemed to require a new way of national acting. A new way of national being. A new way of national self-understanding. And a group of reformers used that hunger as an excuse to reshape American culture into something more to their liking.

“Why should the Soviets have all the fun remaking a world?”, FDR advisor Stuart Chase wrote at the conclusion to A New Deal, the 1932 book that gave the name to the series of FDR’s statist government policies that would prolong the Great Depression for years.

MEDIA HERDING: Clinton Aides Attack, Threaten Reporter for Saying Hillary Looked ‘Low Energy’ at Friday Press Conference.

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AIR FORCE ONE, 9/11/01: “We’re the only plane in the sky.”

LIFE IN THE ERA OF THE LIGHTWORKER: Americans Are More Worried About Terrorism Than They Were After 9/11. After 9/11, we were pretty sure we had a competent government that wanted to protect us. Now, not so much.

THE FALLING MAN: Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001.

SO NOW IT’S THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11. Back then, InstaPundit was shiny and new new. Now it’s not, and some people have been warning of “blogger burnout.” But I’m still here. On prior 9/11 anniversaries, I’ve given shooting lessons to a Marine, I’ve taken the day off from blogging, and I’ve even gone to a Tea Party with Andrew Breitbart.

This year, as in most past years, it’ll be blogging as usual. And here’s a link to my original 9/11 coverage — just scroll on up. At this late date, I don’t have anything new to say on 9/11. But these predictions held up pretty well. Which is too bad.

The picture above is by my cousin-in-law Brad Rubenstein, taken from his apartment that day. You might also want to read this piece by James Lileks.

And here’s a passage from Lee Harris’s Civilization And Its Enemies.

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating today.

One thing I guess I didn’t believe 15 years ago is that America would elect such a feckless President in 2008, and stand idly by while he flushed our global position, and security, down a left-wing toilet. But we did, and we’ll be paying the price for a long time.

God bless America. We need it.

WAS HILLARY’S “DEPLORABLES” COMMENT A STRATEGIC PLAY?, Allahpundit asks:

Her best bet, now more than ever, is to paint Trump as a total monster, leaving her as the only kinda-sorta responsible choice. That’s what all the Democratic messaging this week about Trump bro-hugging Putin and ISIS rooting for Trump is about too. Reagan wanted voters heading into the booth in 1980 to ask themselves, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Hillary wants them asking themselves, “I’m not actually going to vote for this fascist sympathizer and his sleazy David-Duke-fan base, am I?”

Read the whole thing.

MESSAGE CONTROL: Entire Media Freaks Out After Trump Over-Performance in Forum.

Suddenly, Lauer is garbage, no better—in the eyes of the mainstream media—than some basement-dwelling right-wing blogger.

His sin? He allowed Trump to speak during the candidate forum, and didn’t press the Republican presidential nominee on his answers to the liking of the liberal media. This morning, I detailed the extent of the hate being spewed against Lauer by his colleagues in the mainstream media.

And it’s not letting up. The New York Times editorial board wrote on Friday that moderators should do more than ask questions and let candidates answer—they should engage in rigorous (probably NYT-approved) fact checking.

Well, of Republicans, anyway. This is all a message to future moderators — go Candy Crowley on Trump or the cool kids won’t like you anymore.

But here’s what’s really going on:

Clearly, the mainstream media is panicking about Clinton’s drop in the polls. They’re lashing out at each other. The Post is mad at The Times, and everyone has decided that Lauer is the problem. Lauer’s own employers are calling his performance a “disaster.”

It seems obvious they’re all just upset that Trump hasn’t said or done anything to take the heat off of Clinton’s two weeks of bad news coverage.

Yep. And, by the way, notice that Trump didn’t say something stupid and step all over Hillary’s problems this week. I assume that’s the influence of Kellyanne Conway, but whatever it is, it’s a major change, and one that Dems should find worrisome.

QUESTIONS I NEVER THOUGHT WE’D BE ASKING ON THE 15th ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11: The NFL Banned The Cowboys From Honoring Police. Will It Do The Same To Seahawks Anthem Boycotters?

ANALYSIS: ABSOLUTELY SPOT-ON: ‘No president has done more to weaken the US than Obama’: Ex-VP Cheney delivers stinging rebuke to president in searing op-ed on 15th anniversary of 9/11.

WASHINGTON POST: Clinton holds lead over Trump in new poll, but warning signs emerge. A bigger warning sign, it seems to me, is that her campaign is acting worried.

TROLL LEVEL: SUPREME GALACTIC OVERLORD. Trump retweets Obama in swipe at Clinton.

DONALD TRUMP IS NOT ALONE IN WANTING TO WORK WITH RUSSIA. JUST ASK JOHN KERRY.

Or Hillary Clinton.

COMMENT OF THE DAY, to this post on “irredeemable,” “not American” opposition:

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Staff Name Tags at Vanderbilt Include ‘Preferred Gender Pronouns:’

Pronouns have become a contentious issue lately as people with niche gender identities have invented new pronouns to refer to themselves, like ze, xyr, and vis.

According to a university spokesperson, in response to student interest, the school gave staff of the Dean of Students Office the option to include their preferred pronouns on their name tags, which are sometimes worn during major events like move-in day.

Update Newspeak Dictionaries accordingly.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: “The True Significance of September 11…is that it makes Muslims nervous.”

EVERYBODY JUST WORKS FOR VLADIMIR THESE DAYS: Donald Trump is not alone in wanting to work with Russia. Just ask John Kerry.

WELL, WE ALL NEED SOMETHING TO ASPIRE TO: I am the Male Elizabeth Hurley, says…Tim Blair?