Viva Revisionistas!

This, from Jake Tapper’s Political Punch blog, is Bill Clinton explaining Hillary’s misspeaking

“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 (1) and she started talking about Bosnia and she misstated the circumstances under which she landed in Bosnia. (2)

“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,’ (3) 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.’

If that wasn’t bad enough, when Nancy Pelosi was asked about this, she referred to Bill Clinton having a “late night adult moment”. I cannot imagine to what she was referring. It certainly isn’t the sort of late night adult moment I usually have.

Jake Tapper’s subsequent post in Political Punch is excellent,

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was asked about former President Bill Clinton’s error-riddled defense of his wife, regarding her Hemingway-esque accounting of her 1996 trip to Bosnia.

“I can’t for the life of me figure out why the president would have said it except he may have been having a late night adult moment,” Pelosi told CBS’s Bob Schieffer, “but let’s leave it at that.”

Kind of harsh for a House speaker to say about a former president.

And ABC News’ Sarah Amos points out that Bill Clinton’s comments were hardly “late night” — having been uttered at 3 in the afternoon and again at 5 pm.

Somebody buy these Democrats some watches.

But then again, Bill Clinton’s late night adult moments usually took place in mid afternoon.

Bringing home the bacon

A postscript to my post yesterday on Balkan porkies. On the BBC News website this evening, a report about Hillary being pressed on her Bosnia claim, plus the video of her arriving in Bosnia. The camera never lies (unlike Clinton it seems)

Video shown on US TV network CBS shows the then First Lady walking calmly from her plane. Her campaign has said she “misspoke” about landing under fire. Aides to Barack Obama, her rival to be the party’s presidential nominee, argue she overstates her foreign experience.

What astonishes me is that she is prepared to go to the lengths she has, surely knowing that every statement will be subjected to the minutest scrutiny. And what exactly does “misspeak” mean? A facility for telling porkies clearly runs in the Clinton family.

Balkan porkies

An interesting post in The Full Feed from Huffingtonpost.com about Hillary Clinton and the danger she said she had found herself in in Bosnia. Well, it now appears that she “misspoke” about the immediate dangers she faced. A more accurate word might have been “lied”. Here goes,

An aide to Senator Hillary Clinton acknowledged on Monday that the New York Senator “misspoke” about the immediate dangers she faced when, as first lady, she visited war torn Bosnia. Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s chief spokesperson, said on a conference call that “it is possible in the most recent instance with which she discussed this that she misspoke, with regards to the leaving of the plane.” Later, he was more certain: “On one occasion, she misspoke.” But Wolfson insisted that the first lady’s visit was indeed perilous, as supported by “contemporaneous accounts” in the press.

In recent weeks, Senator Clinton has sought to bolster her national security and foreign policy credentials by highlighting the role she played in Bosnia. “We came in under sniper fire,” she recently told the press. “There was no greeting ceremony. We ran with our heads down, and were basically told to run to our cars.”

This is what Team Obama reported

Bosnia:

Senator Clinton has pointed to a March 1996 trip to Bosnia as proof that her foreign travel involved a life-risking mission into a war zone. She has described dodging sniper fire. While she did travel to Bosnia in March 1996, the visit was not a high-stakes mission to a war zone. On March 26, 1996, the New York Times reported that “Hillary Rodham Clinton charmed American troops at a U.S.O. show here, but it didn’t hurt that the singer Sheryl Crow and the comedian Sinbad were also on the stage.”

And Mary Ann Akers (aka the Sleuth) in the Washington Post had an equally telling post Sinbad unloads on Hillary Clinton in Washingtonpost.com. (this was before Howard Wolfson fessed up on the candidate’s behalf to the Balkan porkies). According to the actor, the “scariest” part of the trip was wondering where he’d eat next. “I think the only ‘red-phone’ moment was: ‘Do we eat here or at the next place.'” I would have thought wondering what Hillary would do or say next was probably a close second.