From Carl Bernstein on the pattern of behavior. http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/26/hillary-clinton-truth-or-consequences/#more-470 Hillary Clinton has many admirable qualities, but candor and openness and transparency and a commitment to well-established fact have not been notable among them. The indisputable elements of her Bosnian adventure affirm (again) the reluctant conclusion I reached in the final chapter of A Woman In Charge, my biography of her published last June: Hillary Clinton “Since her Arkansas years [I wrote], Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with the truth… [J]udged against the facts, she has often chosen to obfuscate, omit, and avoid. It is an understatement by now that she has been known to apprehend truths about herself and the events of her life that others do not exactly share. ” [italics added] As I noted: “Almost always, something holds her back from telling the whole story, as if she doesn’t trust the reader, listener, friend, interviewer, constituent—or perhaps herself—to understand the true significance of events…” The Bosnian episode is a watershed event, because it indelibly brings to mind so many examples of this tendency– from the White House years and, worse, from Hillary Clinton’s take-no-prisoners presidential campaign. Her record as a public person is replete with “misstatements” and elisions and retracted and redacted and revoked assertions… When the facts surrounding such characteristic episodes finally get sorted out — usually long after they have been challenged — the mysteries and contradictions are often dealt with by Hillary Clinton and her apparat in a blizzard of footnotes, addenda, revision, and disingenuous re-explanation: as occurred in regard to the draconian secrecy she imposed on her health-care task force (and its failed efforts in 1993-94); explanations of what could have been dutifully acknowledged, and deserved to be dismissed as a minor conflict of interest — once and for all — in Whitewater; or her recent Michigan-Florida migration from acceptance of the DNC’s refusal to recognize those states’ convention delegations (when it looked like she had the nomination sewn up) to her re-evaluation of the matter as a grave denial of basic human rights, after she fell impossibly behind in the delegate count. The latest episode — the sniper fire she so vividly remembered and described in chilling detail to buttress her claims of foreign policy “experience” — like the peace she didn’t bring to Northern Ireland, recalls another famous instance of faulty recollection during a crucial period in her odyssey. On January 15, 1995, she had just published her book, It Takes a Village, intended to herald a redemptive “come back” after the ravages of health care; Whitewater; the Travel Office firings she had ordered (but denied ordering); the disastrous staffing of the White House by the First Lady, not the President — all among the egregious errors that had led to the election of the Newt Gingrich Congress in 1994. On her book tour, she was asked on National Public Radio about the re-emergence of dormant Whitewater questions that week, when the so-called “missing billing records” had been found. Hillary stated with unequivocal certainty that she had consistently made public all the relevant documents related to Whitewater, including “every document we had,” to the editors of the New York Times before the newspaper’s original Whitewater story ran during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. Even her closest aides — as in the case of the Bosnian episode18 years later — could not imagine what possessed her to say such a thing. It was simply not true, as her lawyers and the editors of the Times (like CBS in the latest instance) recognized, leading to huge stories about her latest twisting of the facts. “Oh my God, we didn’t,” said Susan Thomasas, Hillary’s great friend, who was left to explain to the White House lawyers exactly how Hillary’s aides had carefully cherry-picked documents accessed for the Times in the presidential campaign. The White House was forced — once again — to acknowledge the first lady had been ‘mistaken;” her book tour was overwhelmed by the matter, and Times’ columnist Bill Safire that month coined the memorable characterization of Hillary Clinton as “a congenital liar.” “Hillary values context; she does see the big picture. Hers, in fact, is not the mind of a conventional politician,” I wrote in A Woman In Charge. “But when it comes to herself, she sees with something less than candor and lucidity. She sees, like so many others, what she wants to see.” The book concludes with this paragraph: “As Hillary has continued to speak from the protective shell of her own making, and packaged herself for the widest possible consumption, she has misrepresented not just facts but often her essential self. Great politicians have always been marked by the consistency of their core beliefs, their strength of character in advocacy, and the self-knowledge that informs bold leadership. Almost always, Hillary has stood for good things. Yet there is a disconnect between her convictions and her words and actions. This is where Hillary disappoints. But the jury remains out. She still has time to prove her case, to effectuate those things that make her special, not fear them or camouflage them. We would all be the better for it, because what lies within may have the potential to change the world, if only a little.” The jury — armed with definitive evidence like the CBS tape of Hillary Clinton’s Bosnian adventure — seems on the verge of returning a negative verdict on her candidacy. - Carl Bernstein, 360° Contributor
I know this is out of topic ! But anybody knows for sure if she attended the Bilderberg conference in 2006 ?
It was one of Bill O'Reilley's "talking points", and CNN.com has a front page article about it... not sure what you are talking about...
Worthy bump: Hillary's Bosnia trip, the lost footage: <object width="464" height="388" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://www2.funnyordie.com/public/flash/fodplayer.swf?5954" /><param name="flashvars" value="key=78e2523820" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed width="464" height="388" flashvars="key=78e2523820" allowfullscreen="true" quality="high" src="http://www2.funnyordie.com/public/flash/fodplayer.swf?5954" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object><noscript><a href="http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/78e2523820">Hillary Clinton: The Real Bosnia Footage</a> on <a href="http://www.funnyordie.com/">FunnyOrDie.com</a></noscript>
Turns out Hillary's story is true.. except that it happened to Olympia Snowe... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/26/AR2008032602971.html?hpid=topnews Well, It Did Happen to Somebody For those of you who doubt that story involving a Balkan airport, the one Hillary Rodham Clinton tells about darting across the tarmac to dodge sniper fire, take note: It really did happen. Just not to Clinton. In October 1995, six months before then-first lady Clinton led a delegation to Tuzla, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) and six other senators went on a fact-finding mission through war-torn Sarajevo, just before the Dayton accords resulted in a U.S. military presence on the ground in Bosnia. Snowe's congressional delegation had an experience remarkably similar to the one Sen. Clinton (D-N.Y.) described in a speech delivered on St. Patrick's Day. Clinton has since said that she "misspoke" when she recalled arriving in Tuzla under sniper fire. Unlike Clinton's version, Snowe's story was backed up news accounts. Clinton's story has been debunked by sources including television news accounts and the memories of the comedian Sinbad. The seven senators flew into the host city of the 1984 Olympics on a military C-130 that, in addition to its senatorial payload, was carrying 20,000 pounds of peas to the starved city. A States News Service dispatch from Oct. 20, 1995, provided a portion of Snowe's Bosnia account: "It's really sad. People are basically just living there and trying to survive," the Maine Republican said. "They're constantly living under threat of shelling or sniper fire." . . . As the plane landed she took note of the fortified bunkers surrounding Sarajevo's airport. . . . She glanced at the wall of firetrucks lined up along the airport tarmac, acting as shields from any Serb gunman looking to make a name for himself. She dashed across the runway to an armored vehicle waiting to whisk the senators to the city center. She glared at the hollowed-out remains of buildings along the city's main highway, better known as "Sniper Alley." And here's Clinton's description of her landing in Tuzla in 1996, with an entourage that included Sinbad and singer Sheryl Crow: "I remember landing under sniper fire. 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." That was Clinton's March 17 recounting of the '96 trip, coming six days after Sinbad had already publicly refuted Clinton's prior versions of the trip. In other accounts, Clinton had said there was a "threat of sniper fire," so they ran across the tarmac into an awaiting military vehicle. The Tuzla airport case culminated this week with Clinton sheepishly admitting that she "misspoke" after archived CBS News footage showed her calmly walking off the plane with her daughter, Chelsea, then a teenager, at an arrival ceremony that offered no sign of gunfire. Snowe, who is vacationing this week, declined to comment about her own trip 12 1/2 years ago.
A pattern of behavior... http://pundits.thehill.com/2008/03/26/hillarys-other-fabrication/ Hillary’s Other Fabrication (Dick Morris) @ 2:31 pm By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann Now that Hillary has been nailed in an outright fabrication of her role in Bosnia, it is time to remind ourselves of another, even more galling, fantasy that Hillary tried to sell to voters. After Sept. 11, Hillary had a problem. New Yorkers were desperately focused on their own need for protection and they were saddled with a senator who was not one of them — an Arkansan, or was it a Chicagoan? Interviewed on the “Today Show” one week after Sept. 11, she spun an elaborate yarn. The kindest thing we could say was that it was a fantasy. Or a fabrication. She said that Chelsea was jogging around the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and happened to duck into a coffee shop when the airplanes hit. She said that this move saved Chelsea’s life. But Chelsea told Talk magazine that she was in a friend’s apartment four miles from ground zero when the first plane hit. Her friend called her, waking her up, and told her to turn on the TV. On television, she saw the second plane hit, disproving Hillary’s claim that “she heard the plane hit. She heard it. She did.” So why did Hillary make up the story about Chelsea? Most likely to was because her co-senator (and implicit rival for the voters’ affection), a real New Yorker, Charles Schumer (D), spoke of his daughter, who attended Stuyvesant High School, located next to the Trade Center, being at real risk on Sept. 11. Hillary needed to make herself part of the scene. She invented the entire story on national television, the “Today Show,” and didn’t blink an eye. Her fabrication on the “Today Show” was no unique foray. It is her standard M.O. It gives us pause in evaluating all of her stories and calls into question her entire credibility.
Hilary just wanted to heroic, so she said she came out under the sniper fire, lie. She said it was dangerous, lie. You can ask me, that s 96 I think, war in Bosna was over then.
I think this Bosnia story might have been the last straw in her campaign. The "real Hillary" is finally starting to stick in the media. http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html Getting Mrs. Clinton I think we've reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don't. There's no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don't. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don't, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will. That's what the Bosnia story was about. Her fictions about dodging bullets on the tarmac -- and we have to hope they were lies, because if they weren't, if she thought what she was saying was true, we are in worse trouble than we thought -- either confirmed what you already knew (she lies as a matter of strategy, or, as William Safire said in 1996, by nature) or revealed in an unforgettable way (videotape! Smiling girl in pigtails offering flowers!) what you feared (that she lies more than is humanly usual, even politically usual). [Getting Mrs. Clinton] AP But either you get it now or you never will. That's the importance of the Bosnia tape. Many in the press get it, to their dismay, and it makes them uncomfortable, for it sours life to have a person whose character you feel you cannot admire play such a large daily role in your work. But I think it's fair to say of the establishment media at this point that it is well populated by people who feel such a lack of faith in Mrs. Clinton's words and ways that it amounts to an aversion. They are offended by how she and her staff operate. They try hard to be fair. They constantly have to police themselves. Not that her staff isn't policing them too. Mrs. Clinton's people are heavy-handed in that area, letting producers and correspondents know they're watching, weighing, may have to take this higher. There's too much of this in politics, but Hillary's campaign takes it to a new level. It's not only the press. It's what I get as I walk around New York, which used to be thick with her people. I went to a Hillary fund-raiser at Hunter College about a month ago, paying for a seat in the balcony and being ushered up to fill the more expensive section on the floor, so frantic were they to fill seats. I sat next to a woman, a New York Democrat who'd been for Hillary from the beginning and still was. She was here. But, she said, "It doesn't seem to be working." She shrugged, not like a brokenhearted person but a practical person who'd missed all the signs of something coming. She wasn't mad at the voters. But she was no longer so taken by the woman who soon took the stage and enacted joy. The other day a bookseller told me he'd been reading the opinion pages of the papers and noting the anti-Hillary feeling. Two weeks ago he realized he wasn't for her anymore. It wasn't one incident, just an accumulation of things. His experience tracks this week's Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showing Mrs. Clinton's disapproval numbers have risen to the highest level ever in the campaign, her highest in fact in seven years. * * * You'd think she'd pivot back to showing a likable side, chatting with women, weeping, wearing the bright yellows and reds that are thought to appeal to her core following, older women. Well, she's doing that. Yet at the same time, her campaign reveals new levels of thuggishness, though that's the wrong word, for thugs are often effective. This is mere heavy-handedness. On Wednesday a group of Mrs. Clinton's top donors sent a letter to the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, warning her in language that they no doubt thought subtle but that reflected a kind of incompetent menace, that her statements on the presidential campaign may result in less money for Democratic candidates for the House. Ms. Pelosi had said that in her view the superdelegates should support the presidential candidate who wins the most pledged delegates in state contests. The letter urged her to "clarify" her position, which is "clearly untenable" and "runs counter" to the superdelegates' right to make "an informed, individual decision" about "who would be the party's strongest nominee." The signers, noting their past and huge financial support, suggested that Ms. Pelosi "reflect" on her comments and amend them to reflect "a more open view." Barack Obama's campaign called it inappropriate and said Mrs. Clinton should "reject the insinuation." But why would she? All she has now is bluster. Her supporters put their threat in a letter, not in a private meeting. By threatening Ms. Pelosi publicly, they robbed her of room to maneuver. She has to defy them or back down. She has always struck me as rather grittier than her chic suits, high heels and unhidden enthusiasm may suggest. We'll see. What, really, is Mrs. Clinton doing? She is having the worst case of cognitive dissonance in the history of modern politics. She cannot come up with a credible, realistic path to the nomination. She can't trace the line from "this moment's difficulties" to "my triumphant end." But she cannot admit to herself that she can lose. Because Clintons don't lose. She can't figure out how to win, and she can't accept the idea of not winning. She cannot accept that this nobody from nowhere could have beaten her, quietly and silently, every day. (She cannot accept that she still doesn't know how he did it!) She is concussed. But she is a scrapper, a fighter, and she's doing what she knows how to do: scrap and fight. Only harder. So that she ups the ante every day. She helped Ireland achieve peace. She tried to stop Nafta. She's been a leader for 35 years. She landed in Bosnia under siege and bravely dodged bullets. It was as if she'd watched the movie "Wag the Dog," with its fake footage of a terrified refugee woman running frantically from mortar fire, and found it not a cautionary tale about manipulation and politics, but an inspiration. * * * What struck me as the best commentary on the Bosnia story came from a poster called GI Joe who wrote in to a news blog: "Actually Mrs. Clinton was too modest. I was there and saw it all. When Mrs. Clinton got off the plane the tarmac came under mortar and machine gun fire. I was blown off my tank and exposed to enemy fire. Mrs. Clinton without regard to her own safety dragged me to safety, jumped on the tank and opened fire, killing 50 of the enemy." Soon a suicide bomber appeared, but Mrs. Clinton stopped the guards from opening fire. "She talked to the man in his own language and got him [to] surrender. She found that he had suffered terribly as a result of policies of George Bush. She defused the bomb vest herself." Then she turned to his wounds. "She stopped my bleeding and saved my life. Chelsea donated the blood." Made me laugh. It was like the voice of the people answering back. This guy knows that what Mrs. Clinton said is sort of crazy. He seems to know her reputation for untruths. He seemed to be saying, "I get it."
Major, I read that article yesterday and was struck by how harsh it was. It's funny that Hillary is staying in race because she hoped/expected Obama would self-destruct some way. Look at who actually ended up impaled. Her self-inflicted wounds have negated the need for him to get more aggressive.
Hilary "misspoke". Hmm. She's a liar and this one incident was enough to ruin her presidential bid....because it brought to light just what is wrong with her, i.e. distorting the truth to fit what she wants it to be as long as it benefits her. Given that this is the impression, and reality, of how we essentially started a war with Iraq...with a president who twisted the facts to fit his case...I would think Americans would not endorse such a candidate. And, I guess they have not...even though Hillary doesn't want to give up hope yet. It's over for her. I find all this highly amusing...by the way.
