By Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com
"She can't help it, the girl can't help it." Bobby Troup, 1956
Some years ago, then Nebraska Senator Robert Kerrey said of President Bill Clinton: "Clinton's an unusually good liar. Unusually good." Kerrey, a two term Democrat, went on to become President of The New School, a New York City university. He tried to regain his seat in 2012, but lost to Republican Deb Fischer. I hope she's as honest as he was.
Kerrey's comment came to mind when I saw Hillary "We Were Dead Broke" Clinton pushing her new book on TV. It also brought to mind a George Will column (Sleaze The Sequel, 3/20/2000) in which Will noted, "--the bargain that (Bill Clinton) and his wife call a marriage refutes the axiom that opposites attract."
I would have to say about Hillary Clinton, borrowing from Senator Kerrey, that she's not a good liar. In fact, she's an unusually bad liar. Bad liars tell lies that can easily be shown to be lies, but they lie anyway because they just can't help it.
Example number one in Hillary's case is claiming she was named after the famous New Zealand mountain climber, Edmond Hillary, who gained fame only when he became the first to scale Mt. Everest in 1953, some SIX YEARS AFTER HILLARY WAS BORN.
Just a detail. Her parents no doubt foresaw Edmund Hillary's success because they were good friends with Edgar Cayce, or maybe the Rodman clan are descendents of Nostradamus. Whatever.
Even husband Bill bought into that one, as he said on page 870 (870!) of his autobiography: "Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea's mother had been named for."
Get that? MOST IMPORTANT!! Humility is something else Hill and Bill share.
I guess someone could say that Hillary's parents told her that little fib to explain why she wasn't named something more ordinary, e.g. Alice, Mary, or Eleanor. Ooops! That reminds me. Hillary says she's chatted over the years with FDR's wife for advice and inspiration, Mahatma Ghandi, too.
Maybe it was Eleanor who told Hillary to "Duck!!" when the snipers opened up on Hillary and daughter Chelsea when they deplaned at Tuzla, Bosnia, in March, 1996. Nobody ELSE saw or heard the bullets flying, but if Hillary did, never mind Eleanor, that's good enough for the NOW crowd.
Not good enough, however, for the Washington Post: "Clinton's tale of landing at Tuzla airport 'under sniper fire' and then running for cover is simply not credible. Photographs and video of the arrival -- tell a very different story. Four Pinocchios."
The girl can't help it.
My favorite Hillary-Pinocchio goes back to her days as a brilliant commodity trader, when she turned a thousand bucks into ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND before giving it all up to stand by her man as he battled the forces of evil as Governor of Arkansas. She said she gleaned the necessary information from the pages of The Wall Street Journal, though later admitted that she had some help with her commodity investments from a high official at Tyson Foods. Help? Yeah.
Mark Steyn hit the nail on the head when he observed about Hillary, "There's something weird about the need to tell quite so many unnecessary fictions." I wonder how long before the next "unnecessary fiction." There will be more. The girl can't help it.