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Hero of Tuzla’s Honor

Bill steps up to defend it. ABC’s Blotter does the deconstruction:

Former President Bill Clinton offered this bit of revisionist history of his wife’s Bosnia story in Jasper, Ind., today, one riddled with a veritable sniper fire of errors — ones necessitating footnotes.

…

“She took a terrible beating in the press for a few days,” he said, per ABC News’ Sarah Amos, “because she was exhausted at 11 o’clock at night (1) and she started talking about Bosnia and she misstated the circumstances under which she landed in Bosnia. (2)

“Did you all see all that? And oh, they acted like she was practically Mata Hari,” he said — referring to the Dutch exotic dancer accused by the French of spying for the Germans and executed by a firing squad during World War I — “like she was making up all this stuff.

“And then the president of Bosnia said, ‘Well, it was quite dangerous when she came, there were snipers in the hills all around,’ (3) And then Gen. Wes Clarke, who was there trying to make the peace among the Bosnians, said ‘Yeah, it was dangerous, let me remind you three of the Americans who were on my peace-keeping team were killed because they had to take a dangerous road ’cause they couldn’t go the regular way.’

“And she had to go up into the cockpit with our daughter, in a bullet-proof area, and all the other people had to sit on their bullet-proof flak jackets (4) because it was dangerous.  So she immediately (5) said ‘OK, I misremembered that, they didn’t cancel the welcoming ceremony, but it was pretty dangerous.’ ”

In Boonville, Ind., also today, he told a different version, saying his wife, “one time late at night (1) when she was exhausted, she misstated and immediately (5) apologized (6) for it, what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995. (7) Did y’all see all that? Oh, they blew it up. Let me just tell you.

“The president of Bosnia and Gen. 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 (4) in case they got shot at. And everywhere they went they were covered by Apache helicopters.

Footnotes parse what is is.

(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.

It’s also pretty good when he gets his back up about it.

 ”I regret that people like you care more about that than whether she served the troops, and whether she’ll put people back to work and whether she’ll do the best job of getting people out of Iraq,” he said. “And I also regret that there appears to be a double standard about misstatements… Let’s don’t make one more mountain out of a molehill when the facts are pretty clear.”

You know its bad when even AP has to take note that the former president has misstated the misspokenness.

It wasn’t much, but it was Hillary’s War.

Topics: Clintons

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:10 pm on Friday, April 11, 2008

3 Responses to “Hero of Tuzla’s Honor”

1. Lady_Jarhead Says:
   April 11th, 2008 at 8:40 pm

   As a former Woman Marine .. I flew from my base in Cherry Point, NC to Willow Grove Naval Air Station in PA aboard a military aircraft. Asking the pilot if I could sit in the cockpit to observe the landing in PA .. I was informed that this was NOT possible. Military regulations for passengers was strictly enforced .. and ONLY the flight crew was permitted to sit in the cockpit during take off and landing. Unless these regs have been altered over the years .. I question HOW Hillary Clinton and her daughter managed to position themselves in the cockpit .. “to observe the landing process”. Semper Fi.

2. Fatty Bolger Says:
   April 11th, 2008 at 8:48 pm

   The Clintons are to lies as fish are to water.

3. RebeccaH Says:
   April 12th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

   If you think Bubba’s fun to watch now, when something gets up his nose, just watch him when Hillary loses the nomination.

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