Hillarious: Nothing, Not Even History, Gets in Her Way

In a post just 36 hours ago, I reported on Hillary’s Black Panther defense whopper:

. . . this was 1971. During that explosive summer, Hillary was working for Robert Treuhaft, personally. But, as she writes it in her own book, she was a law clerk at the Oakland firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. ‘I spent most of my time working for Mal Burnstein researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case,’ she said. In fact, however, the public record shows that Clinton worked for Robert Treuhaft, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and Harvard-trained lawyer for the party.

Citing public sources, Peter Flaherty’s book, The First Lady (Vital Issues Press, 1996), says that ‘Hillary was recommended to Treuhaft by some of her professors at Yale. She was looking for a ‘movement’ law firm to work at for the summer. As it turns out, Hillary would continue her association and support of the Black Panther cause while working as a law clerk for Treuhaft.’ Flaherty notes that Treuhaft told Herb Caen of the San Francisco Examiner, ‘That was the time we were representing the Black Panthers, and she worked on that case.’

Today, another blatant Hillary lie (let’s call it what it is) takes center stage. Here is her latest claim, as reported by Dan Kennedy:

‘On March 17, at a speech at George Washington University, Clinton spoke about a terrifying mission to Tuzla, Bosnia that she had undertaken on behalf of her husband, the then-president, in March 1996.

‘I remember landing under sniper fire,” she said. “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.” Wow. Now there’s a woman you want answering that red phone at 3am.’

Except that it never happened. I could quote the comedian Sinbad, who was along for the ride, but let’s cut to the chase. There’s video from CBS News. It shows Hillary and Chelsea Clinton calmly walking off the plane.

They were greeted by various dignitaries, including an eight-year-old Bosnian girl, whom Hillary smilingly embraces. No sniper fire. No heads-down sprint through a hail of bullets. Just the sort of good-will tour a first lady and her daughter might undertake provided there was no danger of anyone’s getting hurt. …

By Monday evening, Clinton was saying that she “misspoke” on Bosnia, which, of course, she hadn’t. The only credible explanation for her incredible remarks is that she lied and got caught. Frankly, if she really believes she and her then-teenage daughter had come under sniper fire that day in Tuzla - well, on second thought, keep the red phone away from that woman, please.

As I heard this story being reported today, her silly and equally unnecessary lie about having been named for Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mt. Everest, came to mind. In January, another of her self-aggrandizing lies reminded Christopher Hitchens of that same fiction:

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy “experience”—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim “worked” well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton’s memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.

Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: “It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.”

Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy. Yet isn’t it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that?”

Even if her mother actually created such a fiction, wouldn’t it have been smarter to have kept the sweet story at home? Even if. Why cite it as fact until its falsehood was pointed out for all to see? Because, like most prevaricators, Hillary believes her audience is infinitely gullible. As witness of her low opinion of the rest of the electorate, we have Travelgate, Fostergate, Rose Law Firm Billing-Recordsgate — and the list of cover-ups and fictions goes on.

Yet as we have discovered in the last few weeks, we find the same on the Obama side of the race. Meanwhile, lurking in the wings, we have Al Gore, of Fictional Global Warming fame, hoping for a deadlocked convention at which he will be drafted to Save the Party. Which Democrat liar to vote for? Not one deserves the presidency, but all three deserve Oscars for their dissimulation. Sigh. So many choices, and so little shame.