Mark Steyn grinds up another bloody batch of Hillary tartare in this article found in the
National Review Online:
No One Left to Lie To
Where did the magic go?
About this business of Hillary coming under intense sniping, I have some sympathy. The Clintons got away with this sort of thing for so long that you can’t blame them for wondering how they missed the memo advising that henceforth the old rules no longer apply. Bill, being warier, was usually canny enough to set his fantasies just far enough back in time that live cable footage was unlikely to be available — his vivid memories of entirely mythical black church burnings in his childhood, etc. But Hillary liked to live a little more dangerously. The defining fiction arose back in the mid-Nineties when she visited New Zealand and met Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Everest, and for some reason decided to tell him he was the guy her parents had named her after.
For all of the Iron Maiden Warrior Call Me at Three BS bandied about, Hillary shows that she is compulsive in her lying. Her tormented soul has a need to connect to people she admires, to show herself worthy or their attention. She is in waaaaay over her head and she knows it. Therefore the artless prevarications.
Hmm. Edmund Hillary reached the top of Everest in 1953. Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, when Sir Edmund was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper and a somewhat unlikely inspiration for two young parents in the Chicago suburbs. If any of the bigshot U.S. newspaper correspondents on the trip noticed this inconsistency, they kept it to themselves. I mentioned it in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph at the time, but like so many other improbabilities in the Clinton record it sailed on indestructibly for years. By 2004 it was preserved for the ages in Bill Clinton’s autobiography, on page (gulp) 870: “Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea’s mother had been named for.”
I am not surprised that this turned up in his autobiography. Number one, this "loving" husband and wife never talk to each other. Number two, he spent the same amount of time writing his autobiography as Hillary spent writing "It Takes a Village." The ghoster thought it cute to include this lie and Bill never caught it. The next book about the Clinton's will be entitled "It Takes Three Burly Men And A Two By Four To Pound The Truth Out Of Them."
Secure all beverages before reading the last line of this paragraph.
Eventually, when it was noticed that Hillary was born six years before the ascent of Everest, Clinton aides tried assuring skeptics that her parents had seen a press interview with Sir Edmund in his beekeeping days, Mr. and Mrs. Rodham apparently being the only Illinois subscribers to The New Zealand Apiarist. Then, in the early days of her presidential campaign, Senator Clinton quietly withdrew the story, by which time the damage was done. Edmund Hillary passed away a couple of months back, and, as I recall, the New York Times headline read: “New Zealander For Whom Senator Clinton Named Dies; Also First Man To Climb Everest. Senator Clinton Was At The Summit To Greet Him, After Landing Under Heavy Sniper Fire From The Abominable Snowman.”
Serpentine Hillary! Serpentine!
[...]It may be that when the Democrats do settle on a candidate — which, on present form, seems likely to be about 48 hours before Election Day — the party will then do its usual thing and unite around the winner in order to slay the Republican dragon. But it’s not unreasonable to calculate that significant elements among both the Clintonites and the Obamaniacs will be disinclined to reward the other side for what they’ll see as an act of usurpation. I have no time for Obama and I think he’d be a disastrous president. But he’s your ticket out if you’re a Democrat who can’t face the thought of giving your party to the Clinton mob for another decade. And evidently quite a lot of Dems feel like that.
There are few things bloodier than an internecine war. This isn't quite along the lines of the menshevik/bolshevik battles of 1917-18 but the end will be the same. One side will be assimilated into the other after its leaders are butchered, exiled or sent to re-education camps. I can't wait to see the prisoners shuffled off into cattle cars and Carville fleeing the country, ending up in
Mexico City.
And it all adds up to a Republican in the White House in January 2009 .
The Wall Street Journal also joins the fracas in this article by
Kim Strassel:
Hillary Clinton's been all the news this week, after she "misspoke" about Whitewater, Travelgate, missing files, suspicious pardons, Johnny Chung and cattle futures. Oh wait, after she "misspoke" about Bosnia. Oh wait, same thing.
That's one way to make sense of the unrelenting, unforgiving, 24/7 news coverage of Mrs. Clinton's fictional telling of Bosnian sniper fire and the subsequent debunking of her every word. In a nasty primary battle that has already featured racial slurs and Chicago slum lords, missing tax documents, and a "monster," you might expect this slip-up to have been yet another blip in the media cycle.
But that would have been to deny the press, the pundits, Democrats, and even Barack Obama, the catharsis of finally -- finally! -- getting a chance to confront the Clintons' questionable mores. Hillary's and Bill's scandals have been the elephant in the primary room ever since she first signaled a run. Yet up to now everyone has been too scared, or too loyal, or too weary to touch the ugly past. Her Bosnia misspeak is now serving as proxy for all the truths about the Clintons' non-truths, allowing even liberals to break free from their Clinton dependence.
While Hansel and Gretel used breadcrumbs to mark their path, the Clintons have left a stinking trail of lies, deceit, body parts, corruption investigations, payoffs, incompetence and subpoenas to show where they have been. Like tin cans tied to the groom's rear bumper, these travesties have rattled and clanged behind Hillary's campaign for months and months - ignored for the most part by the media. But that is ending.
And how liberating it is! The video of Mrs. Clinton's speech about Bosnian sniper fire, twinned with real footage of calmly strolling down the Tuzla tarmac, has been running on one continuous TV loop. Reporters have dug up every last person who accompanied her on the sedate trip to pour a little more salt in the wound. "The Audacity of Hoax," yelled a blog posting in the liberal Nation magazine, which innocently asked: "What else is she fibbing about?" Bill Burton, Barack Obama's spokesman, gleefully noted that Mrs. Clinton's recent attacks on his candidate were designed to deflect attention away from her "made up" Bosnia story. Heavy emphasis on the "made up" part. No need to mention Vince Foster, Red Bone, Marc Rich or Webster Hubbell. All this will do.
[...] No more apologizing. Now comes the euphoria, the liberation, the freedom of . . . Bosnian snipers! Suddenly, liberals all over are remembering that they never really liked the Clintons, even as they defended them in the 1990s. Suddenly, they can sidle into a discussion about Mrs. Clinton's ethics, and all on a subject that (bonus!) is relevant to today's race. Suddenly, they can break free of the Clintons, much as New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson did earlier this week, with a look of ecstasy, as he ran toward the daylight and endorsed Mr. Obama.
Which is why it is no surprise that this week also saw the beginning of a tide of Democrats, many of them one-time Clinton defenders, calling on her to abandon her bid, laying out the reasons for why she cannot win this race, and telling her to let go for the good of the party. Mrs. Clinton, being a Clinton, may well ignore them. But what is clear is that questions about her character and honesty are no longer verboten. If she does stay in, answering them will become the new reality of her campaign.
This should have been done years ago during her first run for public office. Will the media will retain its focus when she runs for re-election to the Senate? If she can't be trusted in the nation's highest Office, if her moral character is so flawed that she is rejected by her own party, what assurances can the Democrats give that will persuade the NY electorate that she is good enough for the Senate? The juggling that will occur during her Senate re-election bid will be almost as entertaining as the skull bashing going on now.
Former President William Clinton was hospitalized this afternoon; he was admitted to Columbia's New York Presbyterian Hospital after complaining of chest pains.
