Why Is Bill Clinton Talking Again?

As tough a few days that Hillary Clinton had over those remarks on her trip to Bosnia, it had basically subsided. She apologized, she made a few jokes about it on Jay Leno, and the campaign moved on. Why the heck would he bring it up again, on two occasions, in speeches in Indiana? Just shut your mouth, give a nice little speech on the issues, which is exactly what he did at the California Democratic Party convention a couple weeks ago (with me in attendance). There's no reason to rehash the Tuzla speech, especially because he lied over and over in talking about it.

THE FACTS:

Bill Clinton has many of the facts wrong.

His wife didn't make the sniper fire claim "one time late at night when she was exhausted." She actually told the story several times, including during prepared remarks on foreign policy delivered the morning of March 17.

It's also not true that she "immediately apologized for it." Clinton has never apologized for the comments and only acknowledged that she "misspoke" a week after the March 17 speech when video of her peaceful tarmac reception emerged.

It's also not true that she was the "first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone" — a claim that Hillary Clinton has also made when talking about the trip. Pat Nixon traveled to Saigon during the Vietnam war and Barbara Bush went to Saudi Arabia two months before the launching of Desert Storm.

The trip also was not in 1995, but 1996.

Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer responded to the former president's remarks Friday by saying, "Senator Clinton appreciates her husband standing up for her, but this was her mistake and she takes responsibility for it."

She's also told her husband to quit talking about it.

Hillary Clinton is wise beyond her years.

At one level it shouldn't matter much what Bill Clinton says, but surely he knows the warped media environment in which we live. Why would he step in it?

Mr. President, you're doing it wrong.

Kneecapping

I think Steve Benen has this right. Hillary Clinton's "Tuzla-gate," exaggerating her daring dive into Bosnia under sniper fire, is really hurting her campaign, her electability argument to the superdelegates, and her national security credentials. This is especially true because the exaggeration is not isolated; she's said the same lie on multiple occasions. So she had to change the conversation. And so here's how she changed it.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor made.
"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

Obama's lead in national polls has slipped since clips of the retired Rev. Jeremiah Wright began being played on national news programs. The uproar prompted Obama to give a wide-ranging speech on race in America a week ago. The Clinton campaign has refrained from getting involved in the controversy, but Clinton herself, responding to a question, denounced what she said was "hate speech."

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus (who was fired from his radio and television shows after making racially insensitive remarks), saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that," Clinton said. "I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

This is just low and dirty. As Benen says, for two weeks, Clinton stayed out of the Rev. Wright controversy. She watched Obama hit a home run with his speech on race relations, and she watched him maintain his prominence in the polls in North Carolina and catch up in Pennsylvania. The Bosnia incident has created a major honesty gap. So it was time to push the Wright story back into the news. That's really disgusting. And she continued this outside the editorial board in Pittsburgh:



Mike friggin' Huckabee had enough sense to put the Wright issue in context. Hillary's knee-jerk response is to fall back on reactionary ideas and attacks to sustain herself and her candidacy. This was most emblematic in her promotion of Alan GREENSPAN, of all people, to take part in a "foreclosure emergency group," because "he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street -- don't ask me why because I never understand what he's saying -- but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach." The default is to fall back on these narrow elites, on reactionary ideas and on right-wing attacks, pursuing as one DNC official called it the Tonya Harding option.

I'm so over this and I think that the Democratic Party is over this.

Misspoke

Hillary Clinton's campaign admitted to not telling the absolute truth about her trip to Bosnia in 1996. This is such a stupid unforced error by her campaign. There was no need for her to exaggerate foreign policy feats of daring like this. There are no generals or Rough Riders running in 2008. Dodging sniper fire is not a prerequisite for getting elected. This "commander-in-chief" fetishism is simply not where the country is at. She didn't need to lie about this, and because her campaign has some sort of allergy to admitting mistakes, they have to frame it as "misspeaking." You mean like John McCain? Just like McCain, Clinton actually said this about her Bosnia trip on a number of occasions. There's no way out of this. And yet there are these explanations and justifications. It gives off the image of untrustworthiness and is very damaging to her. I thought the dissembling on NAFTA would actually be the peg on which this would all fall down, but the Bosnia trip has video attached.

Once this crosses over into ridicule of the Al Gore-like variety, it's going to be devastating for the already dim prospects of Clinton getting the nomination.

UPDATE: This is what I'm talking about.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who has been accused in recent days of padding her foreign policy resume while First Lady, admitted today that she may have exaggerated about an encounter she said she had with al-Qaeda terror mastermind Osama bin Laden in 1998.

In an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Sen. Clinton told host Tim Russert, "I wrestled bin Laden in his cave in 1998 and had him pinned to the ground before the bastard got away."

But a review of Sen. Clinton's official White House schedule from that period revealed that the then-First Lady was nowhere in the vicinity of Mr. bin Laden on that day, but was instead greeting a group of honor roll students at Disney World in Orlando.

"I may have misspoke about what went on that particular day," Sen. Clinton said today. "But it was a very busy time for me, what with having that knife-fight with Kim Jong-Il and all."

Sinbad!

I don't think Sinbad is a particularly funny guy, but I've worked with him before and he's pretty sharp, as a well as extremely tech-savvy. So when i saw him pop up in comment threads discussing Hillary Clinton's "experience" of accompanying him to Bosnia for a USO tour in 1996, I was pretty convinced it was actually him. And apparently, it was.

In an interview with the Sleuth Monday, he said the "scariest" part of the trip was wondering where he'd eat next. "I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place.'"

Clinton, during a late December campaign appearance in Iowa, described a hair-raising corkscrew landing in war-torn Bosnia, a trip she took with her then-teenage daughter, Chelsea. "They said there might be sniper fire," Clinton said.

Threat of bullets? Sinbad doesn't remember that, either.

"I never felt that I was in a dangerous position. I never felt being in a sense of peril, or 'Oh, God, I hope I'm going to be OK when I get out of this helicopter or when I get out of his tank.'"

In her Iowa stump speech, Clinton also said, "We used to say in the White House that if a place is too dangerous, too small or too poor, send the First Lady."

Say what? As Sinbad put it: "What kind of president would say, 'Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife...oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.'"

The Clinton camp's response to this has LITERALLY been to suggest that Sinbad has more foreign affairs experience than Obama because he's been to Bosnia. I will go with the studious distillation of the facts of Hillary's so-called experience in place of that argument.

There is no reason to believe...that she was a key player in foreign policy at any time during the Clinton Administration. She did not sit in on National Security Council meetings. She did not have a security clearance. She did not attend meetings in the Situation Room. She did not manage any part of the national security bureaucracy, nor did she have her own national security staff. She did not do any heavy-lifting with foreign governments, whether they were friendly or not. She never managed a foreign policy crisis, and there is no evidence to suggest that she participated in the decision-making that occurred in connection with any such crisis...

The Clinton campaign’s argument is nothing more than mere assertion, dramatized in a scary television commercial with a telephone ringing in the middle of the night. There is no support for or substance in the claim that Senator Clinton has passed “the Commander-in-Chief test.” That claim – as the TV ad – consists of nothing more than making the assertion, repeating it frequently to the voters and hoping that they will believe it.

This is going to get her in a lot of trouble and there was no reason to make the argument the way she did. Calling Obama inexperienced and unready to deal with threats is fine, but turning the First Lady position into Madeleine Albright just sets you up for ridicule. When Sinbad is ripping on you - and scoring! - it's time to cut the crap. At least Bill Clinton can call it what it is:

But given the Clinton camp's implicit argument that Obama is not ready to be commander-in- chief or handle a 3:00 am phone call, Clinton was asked why then would she consider Obama for the No. 2 spot. "That's politics," Clinton said, not taking the bait, as he would put it.

Or, as Obama said, They're trying to hoodwink you.

UPDATE: I gotta say, Sinbad is a funnier blogger than a stand-up, though the constant referral to himself in the third person grates. D-Day does not approve.