The Truth About Hillary

Anyone who follows politics knows the Clintons have difficulty with telling the truth. Perhaps that’s a polite way of just saying the Clintons are known liars. The weird part is that they often get caught in their lies, face some nominal and momentary embarrassment, then go out and tell another lie later on.

With Hillary Clinton on the center stage now, she has assumed the role of Liar In Chief. Before becoming a contender for the presidency, Hillary’s lies had been overshadowed by her husband, a much more gifted and forgiven liar. Hillary has been working at perfecting bending the truth during her campaign, I suspect to demonstrate to the voting public she has the kind of experience people look for in a president – at least the kind of president her husband was.

My favorite Hillary-caught-in-a-lie episode happened just after she became First lady and has been mentioned in an earlier post. When she was being questioned on how she turned a $1,000 investment into a $100,000 profit in the rough-and-tumble cattle futures business, she feigned surprise at her luck but told the media that it was too much stress as she was pregnant with Chelsea at the time and decided to sell her futures rather than double-down. The next day it was quickly pointed out that she sold the futures before she was pregnant. Bill Clinton’s press spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers was sent out to explain. When the press asked about the obvious inconsistency in the answer, Myers responded that the earlier answer “was no longer operative.”

And that’s the way it is with the Clintons; they don’t actually believe they lie. The “misspeak,” things are “taken out of context,” there are stories that “are very old” and they have answers that are no longer “operative.” In the real world and not in politics, these are just called lies.

Hillary’s story about landing in Tuzla amidst sniper fire during the Bosnian war was eventually dispelled by press footage of her not ducking anything except a salute from a soldier. She’s been telling this story so long, a story meant to demonstrate that she’s had experience in the line of fire, that she may have actually believed it. I’m sorry, but even if she was under fire, it’s difficult to believe anyone would think this gives her the executive experience she so sorely lacks. Bill had to dodge a firing squad of dishes thrown by her when he was president, but I doubt it made him a better leader.

Her response to this flap was even more telling about the way the Clintons operate. First her hatchet men rallied around her, saying she was subject to viscous press attacks (another example of executive leadership under her definition, I suspect). When more and more evidence came out, including statements by people on the same trip (some of them laughing at her account), the new official campaign response was that she merely “misspoke,” and then it was put off to her being tired and therefore forgetful. If I was shot at and doing barrel rolls on a transport plane into Bosnia, I am not sure I would forget it, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she has irrational connections to events when tired.

Of course this forgetfulness when tired does not bode well for her 3 a.m. phone call ads that are supposed to put people at ease that she would be there to answer the phone to handle important events instead of other, less-experienced, pretenders to the presidency. I’d hate to think she would be so tired that she would think the Russians are nuking us and order a retaliatory response. I guess the next day, after half the population was wiped out, she’d have a good chuckle while explaining she misunderstood events because she was tired.

Her latest lie is being billed as not a lie at all, just a story that was told to her by someone she trusted and began repeating over and over on the campaign trail. It was a story about a young pregnant woman who had complications and went to a hospital in Ohio. The story goes that the pregnant woman was turned away because she didn’t have insurance or $100 to cover the cost of medical attention. When turned away, the baby died. She was sent to a different hospital but had the same problem and, while trying to sort things out, the women died at the hospital. It’s a perfect story to support Hillary’s belief in universal health care and the callousness of the medical profession. The problem is, key parts of the story turned out not to be true.

The hospital in question, not mentioned by name in her stump speeches, has been receiving angry letters from people around the country. Administrators looked into the matter and discovered the woman was a patient, had died, but did have insurance and was not turned away at all. The Clinton campaign has announced the candidate will discontinue telling the story, but still mentioned that what didn’t happen is still evidence that something has to be done about healthcare in the country. This was again sloughed off as not a lie, just an unfortunate misunderstanding of a story told by someone they trusted. When asked why they didn’t vet the story better, they told the press that they couldn’t look into the matter further due to patient privacy. So they had no problem using this poor woman as a prop for their misguided campaign pledge, but they do respect her medical privacy, so all is good.

In the world the Clintons live in, these are not lies but unfortunate lost opportunities. She’d still be telling the Tuzla story if Sinbad hadn’t spoken up about it, and I am sure she would still be offering her sympathies to the poor woman who wasn’t killed because she lacked government-backed medical insurance if only the hospital hadn’t meddled into her privacy. I think what is becoming clear with the mountain of lies that have built up over the years is that this is not about telling tall tales, it’s become pathological.