Below The Beltway

For some inexplicable reason, Bill Clinton has brought up the issue of Hillary’s error-laden story about her 1996 trip to Bosnia yet again:

President Clinton, speaking in Boonville, Ind., revised history when he recounted his wife’s recent flap discussing a trip she took to Bosnia in 1996. President Clinton’s version had several inaccuracies and was considerably misleading.

President Clinton’s described his wife’s experience, saying, “There was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated and immediately apologized for it - what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995. Did y’all see all that. Oh, they blew it up. Let me just tell you.” Clinton then criticized the press, saying, “You woulda thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they carried on about this. And some of them, when they’re 60, they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11:00 at night, too.”

And, he defended the substance of her lies as well:

“Let me just tell you. The president of Bosnia and General Wesley Clark – who was there making peace where we’d lost three peacekeepers, who had to ride on a dangerous mountain road because it was too dangerous to go the regular, safe way – both defended her because they pointed out that when her plane landed in Bosnia, she had to go up to the bulletproof part of the plane, in the front. Everybody else had to put their flak jackets underneath the seat in case they got shot at. And everywhere they went, they were covered by Apache helicopters. So they just abbreviated the arrival ceremony.

“Now I say that because, what really has mattered is that even then she was interested in our troops. And I think she was the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone. And you woulda thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they carried on about this. And some of them, when they’re 60, they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11 at night, too.”

Here’s the video of Clinton’s remarks:

As Jake Tapper notes, Clinton made no less than eight mis-statements of fact in defending his wife’s lies:

(1) Her most glaringly wrong telling of the tale, on March 17, 2008, was in the morning.
(2) She actually told versions of the story several times. (And none was at night.)
(3) In an e-mail to journalist Eric Jansson, former acting Bosnian president Ejup Ganic said “we didn’t expect snipers,” though, “we still believed that some positions on the hills were occupied by radical Serbs, so I was worried about the overall safety.”
(4) Not according to the pilot Colonel William “Goose” Changose (Ret.), who said, “nobody under my watch has ever directed anyone to sit on their flak jackets. … We do not direct people to sit on their flak jackets.”
(5) It wasn’t immediate at all — it was 11 days later, first in an editorial board meeting with the Philadelphia Inquirer/Philadelphia Daily News, then later in a press availability.
(6) She never apologized.
(7) It was 1996, not 1995.
(8) He qualified it with “I think,” but then-first lady Pat Nixon went to a combat zone in Saigon, Vietnam, in July 1969.

There really isn’t any rational reason for Bill to even bring this subject up. When it was in the news for almost two weeks, it diverted Hillary’s campaign from it’s message, and cost her in the polls, both nationally and in Pennsylvania. Bringing it up now, just raises a question I asked on Monday:

The real question, I think, is what we’ll be talking about during the last two weeks leading up to the primary. Since TexOhio, we’ve gone through two separate cycles. First, it was all about Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright. Obama gave his Philadelphia speech and that seemed to be the end of it. Outside of the right-wing talk show realm, there hasn’t been much talk about Wright for weeks now and it’s hard to believe that it will have any more of an impact than it has already had; which, according to the polls, has been relatively minimal.

Then, it was all about Hillary and her three instances of lying.

And now, thanks to Bill, people will be talking about the Bosnia lie again.

As Stephen Green notes, there isn’t any way that these remarks can help Hillary:

Is there any other conclusion to reach other than Clinton is sabotaging his own wife’s campaign?

That would seem to be the only logical conclusion.