Ready To Mislead On Day One

Hillary Clinton on sniper fire:

"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

The truth:

"...I was told was that we had to land a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire. So I misspoke — I didn’t say that in my book or other times but if I said something that made it seem as though there was actual fire —that’s not what I was told. "

"If I said something that made it seem as though there was actual fire..."? You mean like running with your heads down to get into the vehicles? Clinton "misspoke"... about getting shot at. I suppose when it happens so often, you tend to forget where or when.

From Clinton's campaign website:

"From her time in Arkansas when she improved rural health care to her successful effort to create the SCHIP Children's Health Insurance program which now covers six million children, Hillary has the strength and experience to ensure that every man, woman and child in America has quality, affordable health care."

The truth:

Boston Globe: ...the Clinton White House, while supportive of the idea of expanding children's health, fought the first SCHIP effort, spearheaded by Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, because of fears that it would derail a bigger budget bill. And several current and former lawmakers and staff said Hillary Clinton had no role in helping to write the congressional legislation, which grew out of a similar program approved in Massachusetts in 1996...

"I do like her," Hatch said of Hillary Clinton. "We all care about children. But does she deserve credit for SCHIP? No - Teddy does, but she doesn't." ... Hatch, a longtime Kennedy friend, said he didn't want to criticize Clinton, but felt that the record should be set straight about how the SCHIP program was developed.

...Asked whether Clinton was exaggerating her role in creating SCHIP, Kennedy, stopped in the hallway as he was entering the chamber to vote, half-shrugged.

"Facts are stubborn things," he said, declining to criticize Clinton directly. "I think we ought to stay with the facts."

To top it off, some lawmakers and staff members are privately pissed at Clinton's exaggeration of her role and the claim that she "helped create" SCHIP, especially after missing the November 1st vote to extend it, as did Barck Obama, Chris Dodd and John McCain, while they were out on the campaign trail. It passed even without their votes.


Hillary Clinton on peace in Northern Ireland:

When asked by National Public Radio whether she had been in the "centre of the room" during Northern Ireland peace talks, she said: "What I was was part of a team and that team included obviously the principal negotiators under the direct authority of my husband.

"I wasn't sitting at the negotiating table but the role I played was instrumental. I guess it was in December when Ian Paisley [Democratic Unionist Party leader] and Martin McGuinness [Sinn Fein leader] came to the United States.

"I think they met with the leadership of Congress, with the President and with me and they thanked me publicly for the role I had played."

...This month, Terry McAuliffe, Mrs Clinton's campaign chairman, told CNN: "We would not have peace today had it not for Hillary's hard work in Northern Ireland."

The truth:

...Mrs Clinton's version of events has been challenged by Peter King, an Ulster Unionist Party negotiator at the Good Friday talks in 1998, who said: "Hillary Clinton was totally invisible at the actual negotiations.

"As far as I am concerned, Mrs Clinton was as relevant to peace in Northern Ireland as Tony Blair's wife or the ex-wife of Bertie Ahern [the Irish prime minister]."

...Both Unionist and Nationalist negotiators told this newspaper that while Mrs Clinton's work with women's groups was positive her overall role was peripheral and she played no part in the gruelling negotiations that took years.

Clinton says she was publicly thanked. Show me the transcript or video or audio; something that shows Hillary Clinton being publicly thanked and we can put this one to bed.

Just yesterday, one of Clinton's campaign surrogates (I can't remember who) was defending her peace in Northern Ireland claim to Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. When Mitchell addressed Lord Trimble's quote that Hillary's claim was a "wee bit silly", said Clintonite dismissed Lord David Trimble as a "crankpot" but was quick to use Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume's name and tried to change the subject. Mitchell, being on the ball, immediately pointed out that Hume shared the prize with Trimble!

Hillary on Family & Medical Leave Act:

Again, from the Clinton campaign website:

As First Lady, she helped pass the Family and Medical Leave Act and helped found the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancies, which established and achieved a goal of reducing teen pregnancies by one-third between 1996 and 2005.

Really? The Family and Medical Leave Act was signed into law on February 5th, 1993, just 16 days after Bill Clinton took office. Did she give Bill the pen? Was she whispering how to spell his name while he signed it? The FMLA legislation was vetoed twice and took over seven years before it was passed. Senator Chris Dodd introduced FMLA in 1986. Did Dodd call Hillary Clinton to help draft it while she was in Arkansas?

Now, she may have helped in extending it once she became a Senator in 2001, 15 years after the legislation was first introduced and 8 years after it was signed, but to imply that you helped passed FMLA when in fact it already passed though Congress before your husband even took office is completely misleading. Just because you support something doesn't mean you helped pass it. Hell, in that case even I helped pass FMLA.

I could go on about how she claims to have negotiated with the Macedonian government to open borders for the refugees of Kosovo even though the borders were already open, or the whole NAFTA-Gate thing, but you get my point. When you're basically running on experience, and then embellishing and exaggerating that experience, you undermine campaigning on experience. And although there are solid experiences in Clinton's background, the fact that she feels she needs to lie to make them better than they were, adds doubt to their validity.

Hillary Clinton: Ready to Mislead on Day One