The image would be iconic – if it were true.
On a 1996 visit to Bosnia, Hillary Clinton alighting from her plane and running across the tarmac, her head down, legs churning, heart pounding while snipers in the hills above the airport took deadly aim, drawing a bead on the First Lady, failing only because she was too quick for them.
“I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia,” she said last week. “There was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn’t go, so send the First Lady.
“I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
Ah, memory. The more science looks at how we create and store memories, the more the mystery deepens as to why we sometimes remember things that never happened. And in Hillary Clinton’s case, her fairy tale about her “insertion” into Bosnia under sniper fire was exposed as untrue thanks to the memory of a washed up comic and the viral spread of a video of what actually occurred upon her arrival in Tuzla.
One of Hillary Clinton’s traveling companions was that famous diplomatic troubleshooter, the comic Sinbad. Do not ask what he was doing traveling with the First Lady of the United States to Bosnia. Evidently, he was brought along for comic relief although the other entertainer on the trip with Clinton, Sheryl Crow, can be just as amusing when she puts her mind to it.
You may recall that Crow declared something of a war on toilet paper about a year ago, hectoring the rest of us on our outrageous, wastrel ways in using the Charmin and recommending we use “only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required.”
It is unknown how many “pesky occasions” Crow was forced to use her private jet to get around thus forcing the rest of us to reduce our reliance on TP and return to the good old days when prairie grass was a dual use commodity.
At any rate, Sinbad told the Washington Post that the “scariest part” of the trip was deciding where to eat. The comic asked a question that one might wonder why such a query was never asked by like, you know, a real reporter or something:
Sinbad questioned the premise behind the Clinton version of events. “What kind of president would say ‘Hey man, I can’t go ‘cause I might get shot so I’m going to send my wife. Oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.”
With that kind of wit, I sense a comeback in the offing. The reason why we might indeed inquire about a lack of curiosity about the story from the press is because this is not the first time that Hillary Clinton or her surrogates have told the story of the First Lady parachuting into Bosnia … er, that is, coming under sniper fire.
According to the Obama campaign, Clinton made the exact same claim on December 29th in Iowa and again on February 29th in Waco, Texas with retired General Wesley Clark. Not a peep from our vaunted press corps who apparently don’t have as much curiosity as a stand up comedian about the incident. They just swallowed this fish story hook, line, and sinker. Maybe Hillary should have really gone to town in recalling the incident. She could have told the press that she rappelled down a line dangling from a hovering Huey with an M-16 slung across her chest, a knife in her teeth and Chelsea on her back. Such a story told to our incurious press corps and dutifully printed as the truth would have been worth 100,000 votes at least. If this was all there was to this story, we could chalk it up to press laziness and Hillary’s cloudy memory. Ah, but what would a Clinton prevarication be without a perfectly illogical, outrageous, and breathtaking Clintonian “explanation” for the fib?
Hillary, it seems, “misspoke”:
Speaking to KDKA radio in Pittsburgh, the Democratic presidential candidate said it’s been a long campaign and this is the first time she has said the wrong thing.
“I have written about this and described in many different settings and I did misspeak the other day,” Clinton said during a live 10-minute interview. “This has been a very long campaign. … Last week for the first time in 12 years or so, I misspoke.”
Is this a great country, or what? One can “misspeak” when you call out the name of an ex-girlfriend while in the midst of achieving marital bliss with your wife. One can “misspeak” when being asked the date of your wedding anniversary and being six months off. But only a Clinton could “misspeak” while telling a whopper of a tall tale to demonstrate superiority over a rival and then have the unmitigated chutzpah to add that such “mistakes” in not telling the truth are as rare as hen’s teeth. What this little morality tale will do to the campaign is remind Democratic voters of just what it is about the Clinton’s that everybody marveled at during their 8 years in office; their spectacular ability to lie without batting an eyelash or showing any remorse when the lie was exposed.
Senator Bob Kerrey once said that Bill Clinton was “an unusually good liar.” Hillary appears ready and eager to follow in his footsteps.
Rick Moran blogs at Right Wing Nut House.
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