Karl Rove forces Bill Clinton to provide relevant health information about Hillary Clinton.

So, this is why Karl Rove rather loudly speculated about brain damage:

Bill Clinton stated that his wife is in great health.

“She works out every week, she is strong, she is doing great, as far as I can tell she’s in better shape than I am. She certainly seems to have more stamina now and there’s nothing to it,” Clinton said. “I was sort of dumbfounded. They went to all this trouble to say she had staged what was a terrible concussion that required six months of very serious work to get over, something she never lowballed with the American people, never tried to pretend didn’t happen. Now they say she’s really got brain damage.”

To wit: because there was apparently a bit of stonewalling going on at the time.

…Bill Clinton’s timeline appears to differ from official comments from the State Department at the time.

“Judging by the woman we saw this morning and the workload that she’s got she seems to be fully recovered,” spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters at a State Department briefing Jan. 7, 2013, about a month after Hillary Clinton’s fall and concussion occurred.

ABC helpfully included a timeline at that last link that shows that, honestly, the State Department was covering for her injuries until she could get out the door.  Which is possibly not the most horrible thing in the world, except that at the time Hillary Clinton was also dodging questions on precisely why she obviously didn’t feel responsible for the deaths of the Ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans.  Plus, of course, the Democrats didn’t want to admit that a future Presidential candidate needed six months to recover from a fall and a blood clot.  Actually, they still don’t want to admit that.  They just didn’t think that they had any choice, any more.

So, point awarded to Karl Rove.  Say what you like about him, but he pretty much anticipated how the Left was going to react to his accusation, and then used it to get the story out there.  I believe that this is where one laments “If only Rove would use his powers for good…”

Moe Lane (crosspost)