President Bill Clinton has made another blunder on the campaign trail -- playing the victim card and making exaggerated and inaccurate statements while sticking up for his wife and her fact-challenged tale of Bosnian sniper fire. And he did so on camera, injecting his own bluster and bogus claims, just when the story had started to die down.
During campaign stops in Jasper and Boonville, Indiana, yesterday, Mr. Clinton told voters that his wife had -- just once -- "misstated" the circumstances of her 1996 Bosnia trip, attributing her Tuzla tale of dodging sniper fire to exhaustion. And instead of holding his wife accountable, he castigated the press for overreacting to her inaccurate account.
First, let's go to the videotape. Then let's go over just how many facts Mr. Clinton plowed over in his blundering defense of his wife.
Bill Clinton: "I got tickled the other day. When uh, a lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me. But there was a lot of fulminating because Hillary one time, late at night when she was exhausted misstated -- and immediately apologized for it -- what had happened to her in Bosnia in 1995. Did y'all see all that? Oh, they blew it up!"
Mr. Clinton continued his blame-the-media game: "And you woulda thought, you know, that she'd robbed a bank the way they carried on about this. And some of them when they're 60 they'll forget something when they're tired at 11 at night, too."
NBC's Matt Lauer points out that Mrs. Clinton told her Tuzla tale on more than one occasion: she said it at least three four times. She first talked about facing Bosnian sniper fire at a December 29, 2007, rally in Dubuque, Iowa, in a stump speech that attempted to burnish her foreign policy credentials. She repeated the story in a mid-afternoon rally on February 29 in Waco, Texas, in a speech highlighting her preparedness for handling issues of national security.
Then Clinton delivered a speech on the morning of March 17 -- St. Patrick’s Day -- in Washington, D.C., and repeated the Tuzla tale. And she repeated the tale at a press conference immediately following this March 17 speech. So Mr. Clinton was wrong when he said she misspoke once, at night, and that she immediately cleared it up. She told the Tuzla tale four times from December to March and did not immediately clear it up. Nor did she apologize.
Less than three weeks later [following the Feb. 29 event in Waco, Texas], Clinton delivered a speech on St. Patrick’s Day in Washington, D.C. Clinton, again, told the story of her trip, this time spicing up the details.
"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."
"Everyone else was told to sit on their bulletproof vests," she said. "And we came in, in an evasive maneuver. ... There was no greeting ceremony, and we basically were told to run to our cars. Now, that is what happened," Clinton told the press.
Well, that’s not what happened. CBS News video surfaced of that very trip that showed a calm Clinton walking off the military transport aircraft with her daughter Chelsea. Clinton was even greeted by the acting president of Bosnia on the tarmac. The First Lady stopped long enough to visit with a young girl, as well.
In Indiana, former President Clinton told the crowd, "Did y'all see all that? Oh, they blew it up."
Really?
Furthermore, when comedian Sinbad challenged Mrs. Clinton's version of events, she continued to cling to her false story, dismissing him as "just a comedian." That is the opposite of "immediately clearing it up."
In addition, Mr. Clinton got the date wrong. (Does anyone do any fact checking for the Clinton campaign?) He referred to "what had happened to her in Bosnia in 1995." Oops! Her trip was in 1996. Of course, the Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian conflict in 1995, which is why Mr. Clinton and then Mrs. Clinton visited Bosnia the following year.
Mr. Clinton also said he believed that his wife had been the first First Lady to enter a combat zone since Eleanor Roosevelt. Oops! As the media had widely reported, First Lady Pat Nixon had also visited a combat zone when she traveled to Saigon in 1969.
Mrs. Clinton used to ask voters, "What part of the peace and prosperity of the Clinton administration did you not like?"
It seems that in response to this question, Mr. Clinton has just provided voters a memory refreshment. It's the parsing of words and the slick use of weasel words to avoid taking responsibility for mistakes and errors in judgment. To date, contrary to Mr. Clinton's claims, Mrs. Clinton has not apologized for telling and retelling her Bosnian sniper tale.
