Clinton blames sniper fire claim on sleep deprivation
Published 5:03 am Monday, March 31, 2008
By Staff
Hillary Rodham Clinton said March 25 she made a mistake in claiming she came under sniper fire with former Dowagiac resident Sinbad a dozen years ago in Bosnia.
The New York senator described a harrowing scene in Tuzla in which she and her daughter, Chelsea, ran for cover upon landing in 1996.
But video footage contradicted her recall, showing a peaceful reception, with a young girl greeting the first lady on the tarmac. Clinton bends down to receive a kiss.
In fact, a Washington Post review of almost 100 news accounts of her visit shows that not a single newspaper or television station reported any security threats to the first lady.
"As a former AP wire-service hack, I can safely say that it would have been in my lead had anything like that happened," said the Post reporter who covered Clinton's trip, John Pomfret, who points out the Tuzla airport was probably "one of the safest places in Bosnia" and "firmly under the control" of the 1st Armored Division. What was she thinking?
Sinbad, the comedian who also lived in Benton Harbor and whose real name is David Adkins, provided entertainment along with singer Sheryl Crow. "I think the only 'red phone' moment was, 'Do we eat here or at the next place?' "
Clinton told reporters in Pennsylvania she erred in describing the scene, which she now realizes after talking with aides and others.
Misspeaking is when you're U.S. Rep. Fred Upton and you apparently confuse District Judge Paul Deats, who's retiring, and Circuit Judge Michael Dodge, who's not, and include Dodge with farewell remarks about term-limited representatives Rick Shaffer of Three Rivers and Neal Nitz of Baroda to the Republican faithful at the Cass County Lincoln Day dinner in Edwardsburg March 29.
There is another explanation for Clinton's fib, since this is at least the third time she has had this particular memory lapse on the campaign trail in the past year.
Clinton remembering "landing under sniper fire" and "running with our heads down" when she didn't fits a troubling pattern of her trying to burnish her foreign policy credentials to elevate her over Barack Obama.
Clinton is a second-term senator.
Obama is a first-term senator.
By any reasonable standard, both are political neophytes.
Americans need to wake up and demand the truth from their elected officials, even when it seems like a harmless little white lie.
We are too tolerant of accepting lying as just another part of the political process.
As Americans, we have a right to expect government leaders to meet the standard of telling us the truth and treating the people who elected them with respect.