Under Fire

No baseball here.

Hillary Clinton’s gaffe this week about her claims that she came under hostile sniper fire in Bosnia while first lady has me bugged.

She claimed multiple times, both in a speech and in interviews, that she and little Chelsea had to run for cover as soon as they landed for a visit in 1996. "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

Ooops. There’s video. And witnesses. Sinbad, who was there, noted: “I think the only ‘red phone’ moment was: ‘Do we eat here or at the next place.’”

The Junior Senator from NY did a 180, admitting she had “made a mistake.” It turns out, she misspoke.

There is the word that gets me. “Misspoke.” Did anything at all like this happen anywhere at any time to her? Like maybe in South Africa in 1994, or in Lebanon in 1997 or in Afghanistan in 1999? If at some point, if she really had to run across a tarmac dodging bullets, I can buy that she may have made a mistake and misspoke about the incident.

But if nothing like that ever had happened to her, that’s not a mistake. That is not misspeaking. If I had ever had to dodge bullets in a foreign country, I’d remember that. And if I never had to do that (I haven’t) but said I did, I’d either be lying or hallucinating.

I’m guessing she’s lying. The whole focus of her campaign is that she is the Democrat of experience, and she’s only talking about this trip to demonstrate her foreign policy experience. Personally, I don’t buy her qualifying as experienced because she was the first lady of the US for 8 years and the first lady of Arkansas for 10. Her only public display of involvement in the Clinton administration was her miserable failure to get anything connected to health care reform passed.

But she did hug some little kid at an airport in Bosnia. There you go – ready to be commander-in-chief on day one. Proof positive. Imagine what John McCain will do with her phony sniper experience. After all, he really was put in a box in the Hanoi Hilton for 6 years.

On the other hand, maybe we ought to consider that hallucinating thing. She did tell the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that she was “sleep-deprived” which caused her to misspeak. Uh, let's go back to the lying excuse. After all, would you want a sleep-deprived Hillary Clinton to be picking up the Red Phone at 3 AM?