It seems like we’re beating a dead horse here, but the truth matters and the Clinton campaign has been lying through their teeth.
First, there’s the lie that she was the first First lady to visit a war zone:
The Clinton campaign has cited newspaper accounts, including one in The Washington Post, to bolster the senator’s claim that her now-famous March 1996 trip to Bosnia was the first visit to a “war zone” by a first lady since World War II. She is overlooking a trip to Saigon by Pat Nixon at the height of the Vietnam War as well as a trip by Barbara Bush to Saudi Arabia two months before the Persian Gulf War began.
(…)
[T]he Nixon trip to Saigon in July 1969 should surely count as the most dangerous of the three visits. Unlike Bosnia in March 1996 and Saudi Arabia in November 1990, South Vietnam was an actual, not “potential,” war zone in the aftermath of the 1968 Tet offensive, said retired Army Lt. Col. Gene Boyer, the Nixons’ chief helicopter pilot.
“This was a combat mission,” Boyer said yesterday, noting that more than 2,000 U.S. helicopter pilots were shot down and killed in Vietnam. “There were no front lines. Everything outside of Saigon was a war zone.”
The picture at right shows Boyer grabbing Pat Nixon’s arm to pull her out of the way of the tail-rotor blades after landing his helicopter on the lawn of the presidential palace in Saigon. He had just flown the first lady to a field hospital north of Saigon to visit wounded American servicemen. “We saturated the air with a lot of helicopters and other stuff, which decreased the risk. It was a very secret mission. We went in determined that nothing would leak.”
Meanwhile, Clinton’s story about a supposedly dangerous landing have been debunked by the guy who flew the plane she was flying in:
A retired Air Force officer who claims to have piloted Hillary Rodham Clinton on her 1996 flight to Bosnia raised doubts about her recollection that passengers sat on flak jackets to protect themselves — joking that Clinton borrowed the detail from the Vietnam epic “Apocalypse Now.”
Retired Col. William “Goose” Changose, speaking yesterday with conservative radio host Rusty Humphries, said the Tuzla air base was under such tight security for Clinton’s March 1996 visit “there wasn’t a bumblebee flying around.”
Of the former first lady’s claim that some passengers in the C-17 cargo plane were ordered to sit on bulletproof vests, Changose said: “It was not under my direction. … I remember that in “Apocalypse Now” they sat on their flak jackets. Nobody under my watch has ever directed somebody to sit on their flak jackets.”
Watch for yourself:
This wasn’t mis-speaking, this was lying.
H/T: Andrew Sullivan
March 27th, 2008 at 11:01 am
It doesn’t matter if Hillary tells a few fisherman’s stories along the campaign trail, any more than it mattered how many times Bill enjoyed a roll in the hay with that fat Jewish girl, Monica.
What matters is what the candidates are willing to do to move this country into this new century. Where is the discussion of plans for energy independence? We need a Manhattan project level program, to produce new energy sources (not ethanol projects). We need a comprehensive plan to address the health care needs of our aging population (not necessarily a nationalized program, but some form of cost mitigation program). We need to rebuild our strategic manufacturing base and stop the hemorrhaging of jobs and industries to Communist China. We need tort reform, including the complete revision of the entire body of workplace law, where a single disgruntled employees can destroy a company with one law suit. We need renewed anti-trust action against the monopolies and oligopolies. WalMart is so big, just its bigness alone is an anti-competitive force in the marketplace, and it has killed Main Street America.
Instead of a discussion of substance, we get small minded rants about “Hillary lied” or “Bush lied, thousands died” or “Obama lied about supporting the Black racist politician-minister.”
Let’s elevate the debate. Let’s get the candidates to answer real questions and give them more than a sound-bite amount of time to provide their vision (if any) with specific proposed solutions.
April 21st, 2008 at 1:14 pm
[…] it came in the form of Hillary Clinton’s audacious and provably false lies about her 1996 trip to Bosnia as First Lady and about her position on the Iraq War back in […]