Clinton forgets to leave well enough alone

April 11, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, Hillary Clinton got into a fair amount of trouble when she claimed to have faced sniper fire in 1996 during a diplomatic trip to Tuzla, Bosnia. After the story lingered for a few days, the campaign backed down, Clinton said she “misspoke,” and she even ended up telling a self-deprecating joke about it on “The Tonight Show.” It was an embarrassing incident for a usually disciplined campaigner, but the political world had moved on.

Right up until Bill Clinton decided to bring it up again.

“She took a terrible beating in the press for a few days,” he said, per ABC News’ Sarah Amos, “because she was exhausted at 11 o’clock at night and she started talking about Bosnia and she misstated the circumstances under which she landed in Bosnia.

“Did you all see all that? And oh, they acted like she was practically Mata Hari,” he said — referring to the Dutch exotic dancer accused by the French of spying for the Germans and executed by a firing squad during World War I — “like she was making up all this stuff.

“And then the president of Bosnia said, ‘Well, it was quite dangerous when she came, there were snipers in the hills all around,’ And then Gen. Wes Clarke, who was there trying to make the peace among the Bosnians, said ‘Yeah, it was dangerous, let me remind you three of the Americans who were on my peace-keeping team were killed because they had to take a dangerous road ’cause they couldn’t go the regular way.’

“And she had to go up into the cockpit with our daughter, in a bullet-proof area, and all the other people had to sit on their bullet-proof flak jackets because it was dangerous. So she immediately said ‘OK, I misremembered that, they didn’t cancel the welcoming ceremony, but it was pretty dangerous.’ “

Complicating matters, the former president told a slightly different version of the same story this morning, getting some additional details wrong, and giving an already-skeptical media another bite at the same apple.

In Boonville, Ind., also today, he told a different version, saying his wife, “one time late at night when she was exhausted, she misstated and immediately apologized for it, what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995. Did y’all see all that? Oh, they blew it up. Let me just tell you.

“The president of Bosnia and Gen. Wesley Clark — who was there making peace where we’d lost three peacekeepers who had to ride on a dangerous mountain road because it was too dangerous to go the regular, safe way — both defended her because they pointed out that when her plane landed in Bosnia, she had to go up to the bulletproof part of the plane, in the front. Everybody else had to put their flak jackets underneath the seat in case they got shot at. And everywhere they went they were covered by Apache helicopters.

“So they just abbreviated the arrival ceremony. Now I say that because what really has mattered is that even then she was interested in our troops. And I think she was the first First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone. And you woulda thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they carried on about this.”

Good lord, this really wasn’t a good idea. Bill Clinton, no doubt trying to help, got the time wrong (Hillary got the story wrong in the morning, not at night), the occurrence wrong (she told the mistaken story more than once), the flak jacket aspect wrong, and the apology wrong (it wasn’t immediate and she never actually apologized), among other smaller details.

And in doing so, he gave the AP an excuse to write up another fact-check article this afternoon.

I can sympathize with Bill’s desire to help Hillary, but the embarrassing story was going away. Why not let sleeping dogs lie? Why bring the whole thing up again, and compound the problem by misstating what actually happened?

My hunch is there are a whole lot of campaign staffers smacking their foreheads at Clinton HQ right now.

The Clintons are as willing to lie (okay, make things up) as the Bush Crime Family is.

It’s time to move beyond these warring “families” (the Italian renaissance sense of the word) and begin the monumental task to bringing what’s left of American into the 21st century. There’s only one candidate can do that, and we should be getting on with the task.

  • We were suspicious when he wouldn’t shut up in South Carolina. Our concern grew when he kept screaming at reporters and crescendoed when it was revealed that he’s been operating in apparent conflict with his wife’s positions on South American trade. Clearing everything up once and for all, it’s just been announced that Bill Clinton is actually employed by Barack Obama.

  • Wanting to smack HIS head, more like…watching all these people running for the highest office in the land and listening to the things that come out of their mouths the thought sometimes runs thru my head that we are sooooo screwed!

  • I was about to say that my conspiracy theory du jour is that Bill Clinton doesn’t particularly want Hillary to win. The power’s great, but the scrutiny is a bitch, especially if he’s, shall we say, still having problems with what the definition of “is” is. Better to publicly support Hillary & subtly (subconsciously?) try to sabotage things so it ends once and for all.

  • Maybe it has something to do with what Vermont blogger Philip Baruth suspected way back in May of ’06 would be perhaps an unconscious desire to help Hillary lose:
    http://vermontdailybriefing.com/?p=288

    And he likened it to Bob Dole’s assistance in hurting Liddy’s chances by “airing erectile dysfunction commercials during the primaries.”

  • ….slappy magoo said:
    I was about to say that my conspiracy theory du jour is that Bill Clinton doesn’t particularly want Hillary to win. The power’s great, but the scrutiny is a bitch…

    Not to mention that he might have to give up some of those lucrative speaking engagements that support causes that are diametrically opposed to Hilll’s proposed stances…or are they?

  • His casual truth-twisting is very Clintonian. I had a flashback to the 90s when I read this.

  • You forgot the part where he says, “And you woulda thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they carried on about this. And some of them when they’re 60 they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11 at night, too.” So, according to Bill, Hillary becomes confused because she’s old and when it’s too late at night. What will she do at 3 a.m.?

  • HILLARY AND BILL ARE LIARS… THE SOURCE OF THE OBAMA MUSLIM LIE HAS BEEN REVEALED NOW TOO…

    UPDATE: Debbie Schlussel, an inflammatory right-wing blogger and originator of the “Obama is a Muslim” lie, has identified herself as one of Wallsten’s sources.
    Here’s some background on Schlussel, from my recent article:
    “Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim,” blogger Debbie Schlussel wrote on December 18, 2006. Schlussel had a history of inflammatory rhetoric and baseless accusations. She said journalist Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents in 2006, “hates America” and “hates Israel”; labeled George Soros a “fake Holocaust survivor”; and speculated that Pakistani terrorists were somehow to blame for last year’s shootings at Virginia Tech.

  • My guess is in their very biased version of reality he thinks what he said is the truth. Yes, he could fact check, but people who make their own reality in their head don’t do that. He knows what he says gets fact-checked, so if he didn’t really believe the biased and misleading version of the story he is telling now he wouldn’t have told it several times.

  • So what? This is such a non-issue. Unless someone is claiming that Clinton never went to Bosnia at all, I don’t see why any of this matters.

  • Leadership and taxes

    “It’s important to have core principles and values, but if you’re going to be active in policy and politics, you have to be a realist.” —Hillary Clinton

    “We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re going to cut short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” —Hillary Clinton, in a 2004 fundraising speech to wealthy liberals in San Francisco

    Bipartisanship and reaching across the isle

    “I believe in evil, and I think that there are evil people in the world.” —Hillary Clinton, in 1993, stating her opinion not of the terrorists who had just bombed the World Trade Center for the first time in 1993, but of those who opposed her health care reform plan

    “You have got to hand it to them, these people are ruthless and they are relentless.” —Sen. Hillary Clinton, just a few months after 9/11, giving her opinion of Republicans

    Health care

    “We just can’t trust the American people to make these types of decisions. …Government has to make these choices for people.” —Hillary Clinton circa 1993, speaking to Rep. Dennis Hastert on the issue of who should control the allocation of money in her health care reform plan

    “We can’t afford to have that money go to the private sector. The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better than the private sector will spend it.” —First Lady Hillary Clinton, in 1993, regarding health care reform

    Free speech

    “We’re all going to have to rethink how we deal with the Internet. As exciting as these new developments are, there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gate-keeping function.” —First Lady Hillary Clinton, in 1998, days after the Monica Lewinsky story was reported

    Blaming America

    “I pledge allegiance to the America that can be.” —Hillary Clinton, reluctant to say the Pledge of Allegiance, according to Chris Matthews

    “The unfettered free market has been the most radically disruptive force in American life in the last generation.” —Hillary Clinton

    Imagination

    “The fact of the matter is, I’ve always been a Yankees fan.” —Senate candidate Hillary Clinton, soon after launching her campaign in 1999, and ignoring prior public statements about growing up as a Cubs fan in Chicago

  • Not to mention that he might have to give up some of those lucrative speaking engagements

    Those speaking engagements drop dramatically in value if he and Hillary don’t get back into the White House and the Clinton/DLC reign of error is finally (!) ended.

    No, he wants it as much as, or more than, she does. He’s just throwing wild punches because he’s thoroughly desperate.

  • Unless someone is claiming that Clinton never went to Bosnia at all, I don’t see why any of this matters.

    Even if someone did claim that, you wouldn’t see why it mattered, Mare.

    It would be interesting to see how far you’d go to defend or dismiss as irrelevant any Clinton behavior. Interesting in a “it burns, it burns, but I cannot look away” kind of way.

  • Why don’t you just explain why you think this IS important, Maria.

    People get trivial details about things wrong all the time, but no one calls it lying. People misremember and mis-state things all the time and no one cares. There is a phenomenon of language called “linguistic charity” which means that we hear what people intend to say and what they mean instead of the literal words — we focus on substance not irrelevant and superficial details. The Clintons are given no such charity by folks who hate them. There is nothing new in the fact that the Clintons are hated. Anyone can nit-pick and find fault in anyone else’s statements if they talk enough — and candidates talk a lot. So what exactly is the point of this?

  • The reason it’s news, Mary, is that the Tuzla story was dead and the person who revived it was Bill. The way news works is not dog bites man but man bites dog. In this case, Hillary’s opponent didn’t attack her, she got bit by her husband. We start to wonder if Bill is really trying to sabotage Hillary’s chances of winning or if he’s not as sharp as he used to be or if we really, really want him anywhere near the WH again.

  • This entire silly season, from New Hampshire on, has been an unbroken litany of Clintonian missteps, miscues, muffs, maladroit blunders, bobbles, badinage and boorishness.

    When the history of this (OK, “herstory”) campaign is written, it will be noted that no one knows what Barack Obama’s response would have been, had Hillary and her minions not so lovingly, carefully and thoroughly destroyed her candidacy — without any outside help whatsoever.

    Just think what damage she might have inflicted in the Oval Office. The mind boggles.

  • People get trivial details about things wrong all the time, but no one calls it lying. -Mary

    Being shot at versus being greeted by a choir of children isn’t a trivial detail, and it greatly changes the impact of the story. Clinton’s embellishment serves to bolster a claim that she’s risked life and limb for this country, but in truth, all her lie does is trivialize the efforts and sacrifices of those who truly do risk life and limb for this country.

    No one rational believes that it is trivial to confuse being shot at with tea on the tarmac. Ask anyone who has ever been shot at; it’s something you never forget. Because of the frequency with which she repeated the story, we’re left with only one option: she’s lying.

    Given the embellishment of other stump stories, we can either believe she’s a chronic liar who doesn’t understand that, in the internet age, someone will check on her stories, or she’s an incompetent manager who chooses to say things repeatedly which haven’t been vetted at all. Neither is a quality I look for in a President.

    Misspeaking would be saying she landed in Chechnya instead of Bosnia. Lying is saying she was under sniper fire and had to race across the tarmac when she was really sipping tea and listening to a children’s choir. The inability to see this distinction is willful and obtuse.

  • I don’t think there’s anything, literally anything, the Clintons wouldn’t lie about. As Bad Billy did today, they even lie about their lies. They lie when there’s no need to do so; they lie when it serves no purpose. Perhaps they can’t help themselves.

    They, their mirror image on the other side who currently sit in the White House, and the flunkies, courtiers and apologists who surround both, can’t go away soon enough.

  • Bill really doesn’t want Hill to win. He’d have to keep his zipper up for four years (or until they impeach and remove her, whichever comes first.) If she loses and he’s largely to blame, she’ll divorce him, and he’ll be free to chase all the tail he wants.

    All the more reason to support Obama. A presidential divorce is unprecedented in American history, and it could get ugly. And by “ugly,” I mean entertaining as hell.

  • Cheney’s mendacity knows no bounds…
    Clinton’s mendacity knows no bounds…

    You should have bookended these two posts Mr. Carpetbagger.

    So who is the worst person of the day?

    One has power and lies to keep Halliburton and oil companies rolling in the dough.
    The other lies to try to cheat an election and seize power for his family.

    You want to argue that Bill’s lies are whiter? Because he is supposedly a good guy?
    Good luck making that argument.

    Really the only sane choice is cart these old fools off to the dung heap and bury them both heads down. This Bush Clinton Cheney insanity has got to end. Jesus… it is way past time to move on…

  • Look, Mary, when this story first broke you were running around claiming that Clinton’s story was about her activities at the border, not at the Tuszla airport. It was a pretty desperate attempt on your part, like so many of your Clinton “defenses,” and it was wrong. You didn’t care if it was wrong or not. You believe that absolutely anything goes in the service of getting a female into the presidency.

    Once Clinton finally copped to having “misspoken”–an overcharitable interpretation of willfully telling the same lie several times, including putting it down in prepared remarks–you suddenly began braying about how we should find other topics of convo because this story wasn’t very interesting.

    Obviously, voters felt differently. The consensus seems to be that if someone would lie so transparently (and so ludicrously dramatically) about something like this, what wouldn’t she lie about? This measurably did her more harm than Wright did Obama, at least so far. (Interestingly, and completely anecdotally, I know three mothers, strong Clinton supporters prior to this incident, who say that what really got them was not the clumsiness and needlessness of her lie, but that she didn’t see that blithely describing herself as having exposed her child to gunfire was unbelievably damning.)

    But eventually the discussion of this amazing display of either compulsive fabrication or deep disconnection from reality faded away. Now Bill has brought it up again, like a scab he can’t stop picking, and he’s managed to pile more incorrect statements on top of his wife’s.

    I don’t happen to agree with anyone who thinks he’s consciously or subconsciously trying to sabotage his wife’s chances. I think it’s pretty damned obvious that he wants the White House badly and is so caught up in the vision of his own third term that he’s not even checking in with the actual candidate to see if she’s down with what he has to say publicly.

    He used to be a skilled, instinctual politician and now he’s increasingly proving to be an out-of-touch, overemotional, controlling, unguided missile. And baby, you better believe that’s news, because he’s doing more than his part to keep your girl out of the White House.

  • They lie when there’s no need to do so; they lie when it serves no purpose. Perhaps they can’t help themselves.

    They lie even when the truth would serve them better. It’s a pathology with those people.

  • Man, the Clinton campaign is the worst possible advertisement for her as President. She can’t fire Penn, she can’t control Bill, she couldn’t come up with a functioning campaign staff, and Penn cooked up the most lethal strategy for her possible and she’s till sticking to it. Reminds me of the Red Coats under Braddock in 1755 marching through the Pennsylvania forest, never breaking ranks because that wasn’t the plan and one has to stick to the plan. Too bad the Indians had their own plan.

  • To answer Mary’s question “why is this an important issue?”, because this woman will lie to achieve any goals. Is this really the woman you want running the CIA and National Security? I am a mother of a 2 year old and the prospect of her scares the hell out of me.

  • I think it is vaild to look at Bill’s motivation for these outbursts. The man is obsessed with his legacy. Does a Hillary presidency take away from his legacy? Would she be a better president? – By the way this scenario, for me, would be a nightmare.

  • 12. On April 11th, 2008 at 3:30 pm, Mary said:
    So what? This is such a non-issue. Unless someone is claiming that Clinton never went to Bosnia at all, I don’t see why any of this matters.

    Soooooo…utilizing the same sort of non-logic, you & I could’ve dated, once. Just once. And I could tell everyone you gave me mono, when really, you just gave me the crabs, and as long as no one claimed we never dated at all, it wouldn’t matter. Nice. Thanks. I’m sure that would relieve lots of your exes.

  • Mary,

    Clinton’s repeated “misstatements” matters because it brings into question her (and his) truthfulness. I, for one, feel that Hillary deliberately exagerated the whole Bosnia experience in an attempt to make herself look more heroic.

    Truthfulness leads straight to trustworthiness. Incidents like this one, rightly or wrongly, cal into question whether we can trust the Clintons.

    That is why this matters.

  • Mary, it also matters, because without this story, Hillary didn’t have a claim that she had ever been involved in a crisis situation. Without the Macedonia border and Irish peace treaty, she has no claim to serious international diplomacy. Assuming you are correct in believing the 3AM ad was about mothers getting up in the middle of the night to feed the baby, you still have a problem in that pretty much everyone else thought it was about handling an international crisis. Without these bizarre exaggerations, Hillary couldn’t make that argument. Since we currently have a president who has an overly casual relationship with reality, that’s a huge problem.

  • I can sympathize with Bill’s desire to help Hillary, but the embarrassing story was going away. Why not let sleeping dogs lie? Why bring the whole thing up again, and compound the problem by misstating what actually happened?

    I still remember Billy Carter popping up and embarrassing his brother, Pres. Jimmy. Do Democrats really want to live through that again?

    At least Billy never thought it would be a good idea to run off and conduct his own ad hoc foreign policy.

  • When people are starting to change an age-old saying to: “Liar, liar, sniper fire!” and it doesn’t have to be explained because everyone “gets it” on first hearing it… You’d better believe it matters. We’ve had a moron liar at the helm for 7.5 years, with half a year still to go; we don’t want another liar — however intelligent — representing us for another 8 years, either in the world or domestically.

  • Complicating matters, the former president told a slightly different version of the same story this morning, getting some additional details wrong, and giving an already-skeptical media another bite at the same apple.

    Bill Clinton has been lying to so many people about so many things for so long, he couldn’t tell the truth if you held a gun to his head.

    The only good thing of this campaign is that a majority of people now understand why, as a good Democrat, I never voted for this lying sack of shit even once.

  • Does the world really need this drama King and Queen in the White House? Good for tabloid journalism, but their credibility invites a press feeding frenzy. Perhaps that is the objective, to play the victim card..

  • Mary, do you rerqalize what a marvelous advertisement against feminism you are? Willfully ignorant, hysterical, incompetent in your job….

  • from swimming freestyle:

    “I’m no psychologist, but I can’t help but wonder if Bill Clinton doesn’t have a self destructive streak. A couple weeks after his wife was eviscerated in the press for embellishing her version of a trip to Bosnia, Bill Clinton raised the issue again yesterday and again today.”

    http://swimmingfreesyle.typepad.com

  • Willfully ignorant, hysterical, incompetent in your job….

    Wait. Cleaver, wasn’t that the orange-juice lady—Anita Bryant?

  • Laura

    Here’s someone who probably agrees with you:

    ….that brings us to the real conspiracy-theory: that Clinton wants Hillary to lose.

    Think about it. Bob Dole did everything he could, as far as we could tell, to tank Liddy’s chances in 2000: he announced that he’d probably support John McCain, and he began airing erectile dysfunction commercials during the primaries, to take two fairly obvious examples.

    Why? Because Bob Dole desperately didn’t want to be First Gentleman in a White House that had been denied him time after time after time.

    Do you think Bill Clinton — after a famously stormy marriage and two terms in the White House himself — wants his wife to become Commander-in-Chief? To wield all of the power that he himself can never know again?

    http://vermontdailybriefing.com/?p=288

    Gives one pause to realize that there are American men who marry exceedingly competent and talented women and then throw wrenches in these women’s careers to stay superior to them in the eyes of the world and in their own eyes. It really makes me wonder if the first female president of the US will have to be single.

  • I believe Hillary would be a better president than Bill. She’s less likely to be distracted by interns, and she’d more than likely have a democratic controlled congress to back her up. However, I don’t think that either one will be a better president than Barack will be, because he isn’t as slippery with the truth as these two have been.

  • Never ascribe to malice what can be atributed to incompitance. Bill is just loosing it.

  • Mary, do you rerqalize what a marvelous advertisement against feminism you are?

    That strikes me as a criticism more appropriate to 30 or 40 years ago. Just as Hillary isn’t “setting back the cause of all women” (IIRC, another statement you made in another thread; apologies if that wasn’t you), Mary isn’t an advertisement against anything but herself.

    Feminism is not exactly a monolithic and fledgling enterprise, understood and embraced by few and subject to setbacks by the idiocy of one person. It’s particularly not vulnerable to being damaged by an unknown soul making irrational and incoherent rants (or, perhaps, simply playing games) on the net. Nor are the general interests of 52-53 percent of the population, a group involved and successful in an astonishingly wide range of pursuits, compromised by the failure of a bad candidate to secure the Democratic nomination. The most one can say is that Hillary has set back the cause of women running for president, and given that most people can clearly distinguish between Hillary’s problems and the idea of a woman president in general, I don’t think one can even go that far.

  • I said above, Mary isn’t an advertisement against anything but herself.

    I suppose it’s more accurate to say that Mary isn’t an advertisement against anything but herself and the minority of like-minded Clinton supporters who want so badly to have a woman in the White House that they’ve thrown every single objective measure of accomplishment, competence, judgment and virtue out the window. That still represents a small number of women and cannot by any reasonable standard be called a reflection on feminism in general.

    I still think, though, that Mary’s a particularly tough case even among the described group. I know and have talked to a lot of Clinton supporters, but I’ve yet to meet anyone as willing to ignore inconvenient realities as Mary. It’s hard to believe she’s for real, but I suppose it’s the better part of courtesy to treat her as though she means what she says.

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