WASHINGTON — As the Clintons enter their 17th year at the
center of the national stage, some Washington pundits are running
out of patience with them. My condition is more desperate. I am
running out of jokes about these two perennial college kids.
History will eventually remember them as the reincarnation of
Warren and Florence Harding. For now they come off as two
undergraduate BS-ers on a protracted spring break. Hillary BS-es
about her indispensability to the first Clinton Administration.
Bill agrees with her and BS-es about everything under the sun.
At the beginning of their delightful presidential campaign, a
charmless New York Times reporter asked me if
conservatives would be as critical of Hillary as they were of Bill
when he was the Boy President. The assumption was that somehow the
Clintons were ingenues utterly undeserving of the criticism leveled
at them in the 1990s. I told him that the Clintons would again
attract unwanted notice “because they get in trouble.” They skirt
the law. They defy ethical standards. Most brazenly, they lie when
there is no reason to lie, and they deploy a whopper when a little
white lie would be perfectly adequate and even understandable.
Now, just as it looked like Hillary might have grown up, she has
been caught in at least two whoppers. Both undermine her perfectly
understandable white lie that as First Lady she acquired sufficient
executive experience to be president of the United States —
possibly the greatest president since George Washington, who never
had a word to say about children’s rights or healthcare on the
house.
Twelve years ago this month, Hillary visited Bosnia accompanied
by scores of reporters, photographers, and even television crews.
She had the singer Sheryl Crow with her, the comedian Sinbad and
Chelsea. She also had the security offered by the Secret Service
and the entire First Armored Division of the American Army. Her
visit to Bosnia was perfectly peaceful and uneventful. She says as
much in her autobiography, Living History. Yet on the
campaign trail she has been saying that in Bosnia she came under
enemy “sniper fire.” A planned “greeting ceremony” could not take
place in Tuzla. Instead, she laughs bravely to her agog supporters,
“we just raaan with our heads down to get into our vehicles to get
to our base.” Hillary, you were at the base, you shameless
BS-er. The whole arrival is on tape!
Bill, of course, has been caught lying on tape, but he was
supposed to lie. After all, he was testifying before a
grand jury. Hillary has now again been caught lying and this time
she was not in front of a grand jury. Rather, she was in front of
hundreds of supporters and journalists on the campaign trail.
Moreover, the events she lies about were chronicled twelve years
ago by journalists and filmed by camera crews. Has she forgotten
that as First Lady she traveled with cameras all around her at
public events? And there was a “greeting ceremony.” CBS captured it
and has now broadcast it on the evening news. Members of the
military are rebuking her for slighting their security measures and
their comrades’ courage under fire. “Getting shot at by snipers is
not something you forget — or make light of,” one said.
Hillary, as liars go, you are a dunderhead.
The other whopper that has been exposed this month is her claim
to having been instrumental in effecting the Irish peace
settlement. “I was deeply involved in the Irish peace process,” she
has declared on the campaign trail. Now that Judicial Watch, a
longtime Clinton critic, has forced the Clintons to release her
heavily redacted White House schedules, it is apparent that she had
nothing to do with the peace process other than to appear in public
with her husband and smile. Irritated by her BS-ing, one of the
participants in the peace negotiations, Noble Peace Prize winner
David Trimble, has asserted, “I don’t know there was much she did
apart from accompanying Bill going around.” A “wee bit silly” is
how he characterized her boasts. Yet she claimed in January that “I
actually went to Northern Ireland more than my husband did.” One of
her triumphs, she claims, occurred when she “pulled together in
Belfast, in the town hall” Catholic and Protestant women whom she
successfully coaxed into putting aside their hostility so “the hard
work of peace-making could move forward.”
Reports Toby Harnden in London’s Daily Telegraph,
“There is no record of a meeting at Belfast City Hall, though Mrs.
Clinton attended a ceremony there when her husband turned on
Christmas tree lights in November 1995.” Of course Harnden, a
veteran reporter on the American scene, is familiar with such
Clintonian guff. Surely he recalls Hillary’s BS about being named
after Sir Edmund Hillary, though when she was born the conqueror of
Mt. Everest was an obscurer beekeeper. Hillary and Bill persisted
in this false claim even after it was exposed by amused journalists
in the 1990s. Both repeated it in their memoirs apparently
unconcerned by the revelations. How much more evidence do we need
that the Clintons are fantasists whose days on America’s center
stage have passed?
