Hillary Clinton needs no adversary. She is self-destructing while Barack Obama lounges poolside in St. Thomas. For some reason she thought that her crisis management credentials would be bolstered by an account of her running for cover. So she used an actual trip she made to Bosnia in 1996 as material and painted a scene out of a Bruce Willis movie:
“I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia. 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.”
She left out the whooping chopper blades.
As it turns out this scene made it onto the small screen, in the form of a CBS News report. The footage of Hillary and daughter Chelsea engaged in a leisurely meet-and-greet on the tarmac is now up on youtube. There’s no sniper fire, but there is an 8-year-old girl with braids and Hillary does have to duck down a little to receive her hug and kiss.
Yes, we understand that people have bad memories. Yes, we are reconciled to the fact that politicians often have conveniently bad memories. But Hillary has an excellent memory, and furthermore she wasn’t lying. This kind of tall tale cut from whole cloth is the special realm of the Clintons, and it is an indication of a dangerously deluded mind. When Hillary recounted her great escape, she believed every word of it.
Just consider the mental hocus-pocus that goes into concocting a story such as this one. Hillary would never have made this story up if she realized that it could be so easily disproved. Given that her landing in Bosnia was attended by her teenage daughter, a few celebrities, and many members of the media, the only way for her to have gone through with this fabrication was to somehow believe it. Anything short of that full commitment would have allowed her to see that the narrative would be instantly discredited. Consider, too, how slight an impression the trip to this war-torn land must have made on Hillary in order for her to manipulate it so. Furthermore, this statement does not seem to have been an off-the-cuff comment. She calculatingly put it out there in order to achieve a desired effect. This was considered.
People talk a lot about “Hillary Derangement Syndrome”— a pathological hatred for all things Hillary. But I think HDS works better as a diagnosis for the condition from which the senator herself suffers.
