Much, but possible not enough, has been written about Hilary Clinton’s lies about arriving under sniper fire at the Sarajevo in 1996, long after the hostilities there. When video of her arrival was posted to YouTube showing the biggest threat to her safety was the flower-girl, Clinton explained she “mis-spoke”, but Christopher Hitchens surmises in Slate that she may have been reconstructing history to cover her role in America’s complicity in the genocide that continued in Bosnia in the 1990s despite Bill Clinton’s pledge to intervene in the conflict. Hitchen’s writes that Hilary pressured the then president to avoid the issues lest it detract attention from her health care reform project which, of course, was also doomed due to her inability to build coalitions and work with the US Congress.
If there is validity in Hitchen’s thesis, and his foreign experience cannot be written-off, Hilary’s lie may be strategic in that she needs to cover-up her record of failure on both domestic and foreign fronts. Noting that she lied about the circumstances of her arrival and again when she claimed to have “misspoken”, Hitchens proposes that Clinton lied with purpose:
“There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally lying claim of having "misspoken.") The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor.”
Just how much longer can this farce of a candidacy continue and how much damage will it do to the Democratic Party in the interim?
