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To hear Hillary Clinton tell it, she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest — even though she was already 6 years old when he made his famous ascent.
On a visit to war-torn Bosnia in 1996, she claimed she and her entourage landed under sniper fire and had to run “with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base” — although videos of her arrival show her waltzing serenely across the tarmac, waving to the crowd.
She blamed the 2012 attack on American diplomatic and intelligence-gathering installations in Benghazi on “a disgusting video” when she knew almost from the first moment that it was a jihadist assault that took the lives of four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya.
No wonder the late William Safire, writing in The New York Times in 1996, at the height of the Whitewater investigation, called her a “congenital liar.” Said Safire: “She is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends.”
Photo: Reuters
Baron Munchausen has nothing on Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Now comes the recycling this month of another Clinton tall tale: that shortly before her 1975 marriage to Bill Clinton, she decided in a fit of patriotic fervor and dedication to “public service” to stroll into a recruiter’s office in Arkansas and join the Marine Corps.
It’s an anecdote she trots out to charm military audiences, whether it’s a group on Capitol Hill in 1994, or, most recently, to veterans in Derry, NH.
“He looks at me and goes, ‘Um, how old are you,’ ” Clinton recalled at the New Hampshire event on Nov. 10. “I said, ‘Well, I’m 26. I will be 27.’ And he goes, ‘Well, that is kind of old for us.’ And then he says to me, and this is what gets me, ‘Maybe the dogs will take you,’ meaning the Army,” she added.
Yeah, right. Never mind that the term is “dogface,” used to refer to the Army infantry. And never mind as well that, given the tenor of the times, the Marines or any other service would have taken young Ms. Rodham in a heartbeat, especially given their need for lawyers.
Like so many carefully parsed Clintonian statements, Hillary’s Leatherneck fantasy is either unverifiable or dependent upon how it’s phrased. When confronted with the obvious discrepancy in her “Edmund Hillary” story, she characteristically shifted the blame to her mother, Dorothy, saying the fable was something her mother told her.
Photo: Reuters
But let’s assume for a moment that, unlike Clinton’s other whoppers, this story is actually, in some sense, true.
What are the odds that, in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam, the anti-war Wellesley graduate, who’d written her college senior thesis on “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, had a snazzy Yale Law degree, and who was already envisioning a career in state and national politics alongside Bill (then a candidate for Arkansas attorney general), would do such a thing — and actually mean it?
I’m betting zero.
A far more likely explanation is that Hillary entered the Marine recruiting office — if she did — not out of any desire to “serve her country,” but as an agent provocateur, determined to show that the Marines were a bunch of bigoted sexist, ageist pigs in order to fuel her sense of outrage.
This explanation is given credence by one of Hillary’s Fayetteville, Ark., friends at the time, Ann Henry, who said that Hillary was interested in probing the way the military treated women candidates. “I can remember discussing it, but I cannot give you the details of when and what was said,” Henry told a reporter. “Hillary would go and do things just to test it out, and I can totally see her doing that just to see what the reaction was.”
Given the mood of the time, and the vituperative nastiness of the left regarding all things military, it would have been just like the self-aggrandizing Hillary Rodham to try and manufacture a controversy where there was none, to make herself look good.
Photo: Getty Images
And now she allegedly recasts the story as a legitimate desire to join the military, to show her dedication to public service. Is the story true? And if it is true, were her motives as described?
What difference does it make!
The late Christopher Hitchens titled his memoir of the Whitewater/Monica Lewinsky circus “No One Left to Lie To,” but even someone as perceptive as Hitch couldn’t foresee that the Clintons, like cockroaches and the Kardashians, would always be with us, forever playing the same shell game on the American people and laughing as we fall for it.
That would be the same Clintons (combined current net worth: $101 million) who were “dead broke” when they left the White House.
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