Just a few days ago, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza blasted people who were talking about Hillary Clinton’s health. Yes, he admitted, he has slagged John McCain over his health, but that was different. After all, John McCain was a whole three years older than Hillary Clinton when he ran and he was a Republican, too.

Let’s start here: Clinton has released a detailed letter from her personal physician attesting to her overall good health — and making specific reference to her 2012 fall. Here’s the key passage:

So, to believe that something is seriously wrong with Clinton, you have to a) assume her doctor lied and b) that her coughing, which often happens when someone catches a cold or spends a lot of time speaking publicly, is a symptom of her deeper, hidden illness.

Right, because no one associated with the Clintons has ever been known to lie.

Now, after Clinton dropped like a poleaxed steer and “They threw her in like she was a side of beef, AND was caught on video, the issue is real.

The same Chris Cillizza yesterday:

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.

“Secretary Clinton attended the September 11th Commemoration Ceremony for just an hour and thirty minutes this morning to pay her respects and greet some of the families of the fallen,” spokesman Nick Merrill said. “During the ceremony, she felt overheated, so departed to go to her daughter’s apartment and is feeling much better.”

What that statement leaves out is that a) it came 90 minutes after Clinton left the ceremony b) reporters — or even a reporter — were not allowed to follow her and c) the temperature in New York City at the time of Clinton’s overheating was in the low 80s. (A heat wave over the eastern United States broke last night/this morning.)

This is nonsense.

The issue was real before Sunday’s debacle. Hillary Clinton has fainted and fallen before in public. In her sworn testimony to the FBI she says that her documented concussion prevented her from remembering parts of her tenure as secretary of state. And her campaign has been so economical with the truth in regards to her health — and anything else substantive — that they make the Kremlin look like middle school girls gossiping. In fact, their first inclination Sunday was to like. The initial story was that Clinton had been knocked senseless by the blazing 80 degree NYC heat and the burqa she was wearing. Later, after a round of guffaws, the “pneumonia” story emerged. Presumably from the same doctor who gave her a clean bill of health earlier.

The fact is that when you are dealing with the Clintons you can count on two things. First, they are going to lie to you. Second, they are going to lie to you. You can’t find a single issue in their public life that they have not lied about… assuming it wasn’t fraudulent in the beginning. The media, as always, is in thrall of the Clintons and will do whatever it takes to help them out. Cillizza hammering Drudge for his coverage of Clinton dropping unconscious while the “respectable” media wouldn’t touch the story is an ironic flashback to 1998 when Drudge was battered for running the Monica Lewinsky story, a story that had been spiked by Newsweek because of the torrid love affair it had with the Clintons.

Hillary Clinton’s health is not a campaign issue for me, unless she promised to die the day after inauguration in which case she’d have my vote locked up. But to say her health is NOT a campaign issue given her demonstrated record of health issues is just bizarre. It is even more bizarre when you put it in the context of the media obsessing over Reagan’s age and John McCain’s melanoma. The fact that the media required a public and non-refutable medical incident in order to cover Clinton in the way any other candidate would be covered speaks to the degree to which they have forfeited any claim to being anything other than part of the Clinton machine.