Hillary: Erecting a Mountain of Untruths

Christopher Hitchens reminds us of what really does seem to be, in William Safire's decade-old phrase, further evidence of Hillary Clinton's congenital mendacity. Unlike George W. Bush, who at least has the wherewithal to lie about the Big Things (such as sacrificing American blood in a criminally unjustified and idiotically botched war), the Dems' on-again, off-again frontrunner is an incorrigible truth-twister whether the lie is small and inconsequential or huge and of vital import.

Here's a stunner from the former category, regarding the recent death of Sir Edmund Hillary, the man who triumphed over Mount Everest. Quoth Hitchens:

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.

There are only two possible explanations: either madam Clinton says these things knowing they're untrue, which would confirm the long-suspected presence of a Pinocchio gene; or she tells eye-roll-inducing fibs under the delusion that she's stating facts, which would suggest a certain chemical imbalance in the candidate's gray cells.

Either possibility ought to disqualify her from public office, especially the one on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Comments

[tomk]

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose Clinton, but her mendacity isn't one of them. Every politician would have to be disqualified. She is now claiming that the story was told to her by her mother and that Hillary didn't realize it was fabrication until after her trip.

The linked article on this issue found this story implausible(that she wouldn't discover "until she was 60 that a story of her naming was false) but I disagree. My siblings and I, in our 50's and 60's, still discover odd and conflicting accounts from our the early days of our family when we get together.

If she in fact invented this tale, was that morally wrong? Or do you perceive it to be wrong because of your (possibly irrational) dislike of Hillary.

Again, I am not a supporter of Hillary, but when I see things like your cheap jab at her a few posts back, and this post about a harmless family myth, it tends to arouse my sympathy.

Do you have an example of a "huge" lie of "vital import" that she Hillary Clinton has told?

I put in a vote for you, and while I'm here,I'll mention that Glenn Greenwald has a recent post on hate crime legislation that will be of interest to libertarians, not just liberals with libertarian leanings like me

[Martin Owens]

If Hilary CLinton is the choice
The Demo party makes
The GOP will pack the polls
Carrying garlic and stakes.

[Rogier]

Tom:

I agree that most politicians have a propensity to embellish, exaggerate, obfuscate, and lie. Would you in turn agree with me that Mrs. Clinton does these same things? From there we can move on to the matter of DEGREE.

Perhaps -- and this is the most positive spin I can put on it -- perhaps she told small fibs like the one about being named after Sir Edmund Hillary as a social pleasantry, because she was trying to be nice and charming to the great adventurer. I don't know if that's immoral but yes, together with everything else she so easily lies about -- from her questionable commodities trading back in Arkansas to the foreign-policy experience she claims to have but doesn't -- I do find it troubling. The Edmund Hillary story reinforces the notion that she will say whatever gets her in the good graces of the constituency of the moment (even if it's a constituency of one).

More so than most other politicians, in my book, madam Clinton is a waffler, someone who cunningly couches her positions (such as they are) in a way so as to afford herself maximum deniability later on. She manages to be in favor of something at the same time that she is against it.

Her longtime position on the Iraq war (and now we're getting into big-lie, vital-import territory) reflects that. She was a hawk until the mood of he country began turning a year or two ago, and suddenly we hear that she was never that much of a war supporter after all, even though she authorized America's illegal 'pre-emptive' incursion against a sovereign country that posed no credible mortal threat to us. But I've never heard her say that she was flat-out wrong on the issue -- only that the media and the electorate have failed to understand what she meant all along.

Hillary Clinton is a truth-challenged blameshifter. If my pointing that out makes you more sympathetic towards her, then, my friend, you deserve her as our next president -- just as the unserious gaggle of women voters does when they handed her the victory in New Hampshire last week because Hillary had just almost cried (or more likely, 'almost' 'cried'. Certainly, the timing of the episode was impeccable).

To me, she is everything that's wrong (disingenuous and un-genuine) with politics. (For the record, so are Huckabee, Giuliani, and any number of other politicians, on either side of the aisle, who are frequently horsewhipped on these web pages.)

Thanks for the vote for this blog, by the way. Now I'll go check out Glenn Greenwald...

[Phelps]

I think she has the same tenuous grip on reality that Kerry had. He would watch a movie (Apocalypse Now, The Day After Tomorrow) and think he lived it. Apparently Hillary has the same problem with history books.

[Windypundit]

I don't know much about Hillary, but it sounds like it could be a case of out-of-control salesmanship. I've run into people who are always selling, selling, selling, and sometimes they lose track of reality.

I think it starts with exaggeration and optimism, and then becomes the most positive spin that can't be refuted, then the most positive story that can't be refuted, and then the most positive story where people refuting it can be accused of dishonesty, and then...