WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama campaigned intoning
the mantra that Washington’s political system is “broken.” Now
with most of his appointments either named or leaked he has
proved it. There is indeed something broken in a political system
whose electorate rejects Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the
Democratic primaries and nonetheless finds itself saddled with a
third Clinton Administration at year’s end.
Of all the Clintonistas that Mr. Obama has appointed, the most
bizarre is the appointment of Senator Clinton as secretary of
state. He himself during the campaign remarked on her lack of
foreign policy credentials. “What exactly is [her] foreign policy
expertise?” he asked. Mr. Obama’s incoming White House counsel,
Greg Craig, was blunter still. In a detailed memo last March,
Craig explained why, as he put it, “There is no reason to
believe… she was a key player in foreign policy at any time
during the Clinton Administration.” The memo led Oliver Willis,
the progressive blogger, to note, “This malarkey about Sen.
Clinton having all this foreign policy experience strikes me as a
serial fabrication on the level of Stephen Glass and Jayson
Blair” — two infamous journalistic frauds.
Those words were chosen wisely. It was in March that at least two
of Senator Clinton’s claims to foreign policy credentials were
exposed as the sheerest poppycock. She had been presenting
herself as having been an indispensable instrument in effecting
the Irish peace settlement during her husband’s administration.
“I was deeply involved in the Irish peace process,” she would
boast on the campaign trail. Unfortunately for her, Judicial
Watch forced the Clintons to release Hillary’s heavily redacted
White House schedules, from which it was apparent that she had
nothing to do with the peace process other than appearing in
public with her husband sporting her famous forced smile.
The charge that Hillary was engaged in “serial fabrication” was
validated again when one of the participants in the Irish peace
negotiations, Noble Peace Prize winner David Trimble, exclaimed,
“I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill
going around.” Trimble characterized her empty boasts as a “wee
bit silly.” Two months earlier she had fibbed that “I actually
went to Northern Ireland more often than my husband did,” and on
one occasion “pulled together in Belfast, in the town hall”
Catholic and Protestant women whom she persuaded to bury the
hatchet so “the hard work of peace-making could move forward.”
That whopper provoked London’s Daily Telegraph to
report, “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.”
It was in last March, too, that our next secretary of state was
caught B.S.-ing that twelve years before while traveling through
Bosnia as First Lady she had to dodge “sniper fire.” This was a
tall tale that she had been uttering repeatedly in her campaign
to present herself as more experienced than Mr. Obama. According
to it, the snipers attacked at a planned “greeting ceremony” in
Tuzla, which had to be canceled as the sniper fire rained down
and, said Hillary, “we just raan with our heads down to
get into our vehicles to go to our base.” Actually the ceremony
was held at the base. It was not canceled and with scores of
journalists and dignitaries standing by it was taped. CBS played
the tape. Once again a brazen and artless lie by Hillary was her
undoing. Said one member of the military, obviously peeved by
Hillary’s deprecation of the military’s security measures,
“Getting shot at by snipers is not something you forget — or
make light of.”
Well, Hillary trivializes a lot of serious things and is often
caught B.S.-ing. In fact, except for her husband I cannot think
of another public figure of her stature caught so often in her
own lies. About this time in the primary season she was also
caught lying that “I negotiated open borders to let fleeing
refugees into safety from Kosovo.” She was caught in fibs about
advice she offered her husband during the Rwanda genocide.
Now all of the above were lies deployed by Hillary to convince
the electorate that she is vastly experienced in foreign policy.
Apparently she failed to convince voters, but she seems to have
convinced her erstwhile adversary, the President-elect. He should
have taken note of her discrepancies and one other thing. He
should by now be aware that both Clintons cause trouble for
themselves and for others nearby when there is no apparent reason
for the trouble other than the Clintons’ bad character. Frankly,
Mr. Obama, it is not wise to be too close to these two. You are
going to be sitting with Mrs. Clinton in cabinet meetings. Watch
out for sniper fire.
