Enemy Liar

Ever since her now-infamous red phone ad, Hillary has been working overtime to prove that she’s the tested leader for a dangerous world. She might not be there at 3:00 AM to answer the phone, but she’ll get the voicemail later.

With her latest claim that she dodged sniper fire on her trip to Bosnia with Sinbad and Sheryl Crow in 1996, I’ll give her her due, though as First Lady theater of war bonafides go, she still doesn’t hold a candle to Laura Bush’s 17 confirmed kills in Vietnam.

Okay, I drank a lot through the 1990s, but I watched a lot of news while doing so, and I think I would have remembered the First Lady of the United States having to sprint to safety in Bosnia under the threat of enemy bullets.

John Pomfret wasn’t drinking a lot through the 1990s (I assume; maybe he was, I don’t know). “As a former AP wire-service hack, I can safely say that it would have been in my lead had anything like that happened,” Pomfret said. He wrote in his report the next day, quoting an eight-year-old Muslim girl who was there to greet Mrs. Clinton and her delegation, “There is peace now, because Mrs. Clinton signed it. All this peace. I love it.” Well, what does a Bosnian native know of life during wartime?

The Washington Post weighed in with its strongest possible condemnation–the dreaded Four Pinocchios. “Clinton’s tale of landing at the Tuzla airport ‘under sniper fire’ and then running for cover is simply not credible. Photographs and video of the arrival ceremony, combined with contemporaneous news reports, tell a very different story. Four Pinocchios.” Four Pinocchios, it notes, constitutes “a real whopper”.

Indeed. But even in a campaign where Hillary has peddled more Whoppers than a theater concession stand, this is a crowning achievement in self-aggrandizing lying. Not obfuscation, not exaggeration, not embellishment. Lying. We’re past what is the definition of ‘is’” territory. She’s a liar with her pantsuit on fire.

Truth is always the first casualty in war and Hillary has gone to war to win the nomination—and truth is the one that’s been taking heavy flak.

It’s always fun to see a young woman blossom before your eyes; it’s not quite as fun to see an older woman turn rotten before your eyes. I’m running out of ways to count how horrible Hillary can be in this campaign, but tomorrow is another day and I’m sure she’ll surprise me.

Any goodwill the Clintons gained because of Ken Starr’s money pit of an investigation has gone the way of the pet rock and the Menudo franchise. It’s too damned bad, too, because I’ve been one of those nostalgic for the 1990s during the last years (except for Hanson and “Melrose Place”).

You’d have to go back to Veruca Salt or the last child beauty pageant you attended to recall a more naked and petulant sense of entitlement than the Clintons have displayed during the last eight weeks of this campaign. James Carville jumped into the sandbox this weekend when he decried Bill Richardson as “Judas” (just in time for Easter, no less) for endorsing Barack Obama. Granted, the beard does present some serious image problems, though (he looks less like a Secretary of State than a Gypsy Joker drinking canned beer and working on his motorcycle on the weekend).

I don’t know where this ends, but I hope it’s with racking sobs and a Jimmy Swaggart-like confessional at a podium, with a moment of clarity hitting Hillary like a hod of bricks as she babbles, “Jesus, I’m so sorry I’ve been so malignant, hateful, lying, and disingenuous. I just wanted the Presidency so badly I lost my sense of self. Please forgive me.”

No such luck, though. This is going to continue to play out badly, and the Democratic Party is going to crawl into Denver in August on bloody stumps. Howard Dean is going to go down as the worst steward of any organization since Vince McMahon and the XFL. Hillary may actually have to run for cover when she and Bill ruin their party by handing the election over to a man who really did take enemy fire.

Barring that, I wouldn’t mind the Clintons taking the family yacht out and getting lost at sea. (Relax. I’m not saying I want them dead. Just lost at sea. If they’re half as resourceful as they are at monkeywrenching an election, they’ll do just fine surviving on a deserted off-the-map island, a la Tom Hanks in “Castaway”. They might even get lucky and find a well-appointed cabana community like The Others on “Lost”. Besides, she survived a Bosnian sniper attack; she can survive life on a tropical oasis).

I have to confess that I would hope that Howard Wolfson and Mark Penn get eaten by sharks. Slowly. I will concede that really isn’t very nice. I can’t imagine all that venom and bile would be good for the sharks.