Straight Shooting Misses Mark

In today’s New York Times on the Op-Ed page two of Hillary Clinton’s former White House staff, her chief of staff and her head speechwriter, prove themselves to be as tone deaf and clueless as their former boss. Rushing to her aid after the Tuzla whopper they take 634 words to miss the point. Intentional or clueless? I cannot say.

Entitled “Straight Shooting from Tuzla,” they defend the entitled acting candidate’s personal courage. They write of how unstable Bosnia was, how they had to take a military plane in order to do a corkscrew landing to evade potential sniper fire. They write about how they spent more time exposed than was planned and how dangerous Bosnia still might have been.

Okay. Let’s stipulate that Hillary Clinton is brave and willing to expose herself to danger for her country. This is demonstrably true. She certainly was exposed to danger as a president’s wife—even as a former president’s wife. She is exposed to physical danger every day as a candidate. There are crazy delusional people in the world.

The question is not her physical courage. The question involves her judgment and her memory in making a very specific claim to a very explicit memory of running under sniper fire to a car. You do not miss-remember something like that unless it is an every day occurrence. How stupid a lie would it be if this were a knowing lie? Well, she was traveling with the reporters who tend, well, to report what they see and in some cases what they didn’t see. Among the press was Andrea Mitchell, wife of Alan Greenspan, the then head of the Federal Reserve. In other words, a person with some credibility, not just the rabble of the regular working press. She was traveling with people with cameras and memories. How could she so recklessly believe that she would not be outed?

Either she told a very stupid lie—and that goes both to judgment and character, or she really thinks it happened and that would go to her stability. These are not good choices for either her or her people to have to make. So, they change the subject. They change it badly and blatantly.
Her friends ought to stop trying to help on this. The more we think about this, the worse it looks.