Hillary's Campaign-Ending Sniper Fire Lie (w/ video)

Hillary's Campaign-ending Lie (Updated)


by nitpicker


Sat Mar 22, 2008 at 01:58:10 PM PDT



Look.


I've supported Barack Obama for a while now, but, unlike
many here on the site, I wasn't so sure that the math was going
to be enough to get him across the finish line. It was possible,
I thought, that he could slip up and say something really foolish
(which, of course, would be out of character) and fall hard.
This was, it seems, the Clinton campaign's only hope. With

the tide turning against her, she would need a miraculous
flub to overcome the Big O's "Big Mo."


And this week did provide Americans with the spectacle of
an embarrassing,  campaign ending gaffe lie.
Unfortunately for Senator Clinton, she made it.







[Credit where credit is due: MasterSitsu

beat me to this, but I missed it.]


You see, Senator Clinton has made much of her time as First Lady,
suggesting that her experience in the White House gives her a foreign
policy edge. No matter that her argument makes as much sense, as

one Kossack put it, as Yoko Ono claiming she was a Beatle, Clinton
has stuck to this argument and for some people, it seems to have
worked.


This week, however, Senator Clinton put a pistol to the head
of her own campaign and put it out of its mathematical misery. Matthew
Yglesias

quotes Hillary saying in a speech earlier this week:



I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia, and as Togo
said, there was a saying around the White House that if a place
was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't
go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went. 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.



That sounds terrible. (If you'd like, you can read the
original speech at Senator Clinton's

campaign site)


But join me as we flashback 1996 and then return to this week.












There is really little left to say. For all of Clinton's arguments
about Obama's lack of experience, this lie shows her supposed foreign
policy advantage for what it is: The misty water-colored memories
of an egotist.


This will be the punch-line of every statement made about her
campaign from here on out. "Sniper fire" will be what the invention
of the internet was to Al Gore, except, in this case, Clinton actually
said the words which will be used to demonstrate her falsity.


The worst part of the lie is that it's ridiculous. Not only is
it not true, the lie itself does nothing more to justify Clinton's
foreign policy experience and seems merely an attempt to build some
sort of drama. Hell, I was in Bosnia for nine months. I slept with
the sounds of RPG fire troubling my dreams and, even shook a bunch
of hands, too. I spent a year in Afghanistan and once awoke during
a C-130 flight to find the plane shucking and jiving to avoid a
shoulder-launched surface-to-air rocket. I  spent hours in
bunkers during mortar and rocket attacks (which really isn't as
scary as it sounds, since the bad guys lacked both the equipment
and the cojones required to make their attacks accurate).
I also ate meals with provincial governors and (supposedly former)
warlords, smoked hookah pipes with Herati shopkeepers and shook
hands Hamid Karzai himself.


None of those things make me a foreign policy expert.


Senator Clinton's superior organization has been the only thing
keeping her in the running. Were she just another candidate, she
would have been out of this race some time ago and Senator Obama
would be spending his time--our party's precious time--going after
the Republican nominee. After this embarrassing stumble--which would
most assuredly come back to bite Clinton in the general election--I
think Clinton is toast.


Update: There are those who suggest in comments
that she might have been talking about some other stop, but that
really can't be the case. In her speech she's talking about the
Tuzla airport. That's video from the Tuzla airport. Rummaging through
databases show she didn't fly into Sarajevo on that trip, which
is the only other place in the country with an airport large
enough to land a C-130. That's clearly a C-130  behind
her in the video (see below) and she also mentions that platform
in her response to questions.


All the outer bases were served by helicopters (I saw many of
them and, oddly enough, have a framed map of the country right behind
my desk chair) and the landing pads were connected to the base.
Therefore



  1. She couldn't have been on a C-130 taking evasive maneuvers
    while landing anywhere but Tuzla.



  2. Every other base would have had them "running to cover,"
    but not to their cars, which would have been unnecessary since,
    upon landing, you're at the base.


Update 2: Commenter reglogge

has my back:



Just checked with her published schedules...


the landing in the video was her ONLY landing by plane in
Bosnia. Touched down in Tuzla 8:45 am, then two more fights
during that day to army posts by helicopter. Left Bosnia by
plane again that very evening to Aviano AFB, Italy.


http://www.clintonlibrary.gov/...


pages 468 to 471


The schedule even has the 8-year-old girl on it, so everything
seems to have run according to plan.


No chance that the video shows anything else but her ONLY
landing in Bosnia. Documentary evidence.



Update 3: A former Clinton staffer says they
were on a C-17 and, yes, that could be a C-17 behind her in that
video, but the minimum runway distance requirement is the same for
both planes.







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