RUSH: Whispers are persisting, whispers — there’s a whisper campaign, folks — that Mrs. Clinton is sick; that she will not run for the presidency because she is sick. I mean ill. Now, there are two possibilities here. One is that she is sick. We hope she’s not. We hope Mrs. Clinton’s health is good.

But if she is sick, if she has significant health challenges, would that explain her inexplicable behavior regarding Benghazi? If you remember, the left tried to say that Ronald Reagan was suffering from Alzheimer’s much sooner than the Reagan family ever admitted it, or announced it. Lesley Stahl had a book once, and she concluded in her book, “I now believe that Reagan aides and his wife Nancy covered up his condition of Alzheimer’s, and many continued to cover it up as they wrote their memoirs.

“But then the public knew something wasn’t right. There were all sorts of signs that Reagan was not all there. We all looked the other way.” Those whispers were fine. I’ll never forget them, folks. It didn’t take long after Reagan’s Iran-Contra testimony. That’s when the, Psst! Psst!” started. He was still in office in his second term, and here came the media speculating that he wasn’t right. “Maybe it’s Alzheimer’s!”

If you were paying attention back then, you remember. They said they were just trying to help the country. Now with Mrs. Clinton, it’s an entirely different circumstance. So there’s one of two things here. Either she is sick or she isn’t — and if she isn’t, there is a really vicious rumor campaign that has begun, and let’s focus on that. If there is a rumor campaign against Mrs. Clinton, who would be behind this? Who is doing it?

The conventional wisdom is that every Democrat alive wants Mrs. Clinton to get the nomination and to be the next president. Do the Republicans have the gonads to do something like this? Do the Republicans have the gonads to start a rumor that Mrs. Clinton is ill? It’s Drudge’s lead story there with a picture of Hillary looking like she’s in great stress and distress.

The headline is: “Is She Sick?” That’s all it takes, and people start wondering, “What kind of sick?” It’s not specified in any of these stories. “So it must be bad!” Oh, and people start wondering, “What is it?” and it just begins to feed on itself, and you know how that can end up, all kinds of rumors about what it really is. If it is a rumor campaign, who is behind this, and what is their objective? ‘Cause if it’s rumor campaign, it’s a successful one.

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RUSH: Mrs. Clinton’s health. Again, I just want to stress: She either is sick… Let me give you history of this, by the way, and it’s not just conservatives who are focusing on Mrs. Clinton’s health. Apparently she was hospitalized in 2013, is that right? Yeah.

Her “health made headlines as she finished her term as secretary of state: aides explained then that she developed a stomach virus, hit her head, suffered a concussion and subsequently developed a blood clot in her brain but was being medicated and was expected to recover. But skeptics say there is much more the story of her health…” So she was hospitalized for that concussion and so forth.

Melinda Henneberger, I think, used to write at TIME or US News and is now at the Washington Post. Melinda Henneberger “wrote a piece titled, ‘How sick is Hillary Clinton?'” Melinda Henneberger a big lib, is the point here. “‘Already,’ Henneberger wrote, ‘reports that describe Clinton’s right transverse sinus venous thrombosis as potentially life-threatening…” A-ha.

So Hillary’s “right transverse sinus venous thrombosis [was] potentially life-threatening, though apparently caught in enough time, sound a lot more serious than the word from her doctors that the secretary is ‘making excellent progress and we are confident she will make a full recovery. She is in good spirits, engaging with her doctors, her family and her staff.'” But you had here the Drive-By Media not really believing that, and then Melinda Henneberger said, will we “really be shocked to learn down the road that reports during her hospitalization had put a positive spin on her condition?”

So it’s not just so-called conservatives or Republicans coming up with this. This has long been speculated by Drive-By Media types. So she either she’s sick — which we hope she’s not — or this is a massive rumor campaign that has begun, and, if it is a rumor campaign, I just want to go on record. If this indeed is established as a rumor campaign, my prediction is that a Democrat is behind it. There will be a lot of Republicans trying to take credit for it if it’s a rumor campaign that ends up being successful in terms of damaging her chances to win the presidency.