New York Times Claims Hillary “Embelished” Lie About Being Under Fire in Bosnia

New York Times Claims Hillary “Embelished” Lie About Being Under Fire in Bosnia



It’s not a lie if you believe it. That’s the defense that the New York Times is going with.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/opinion/why-our-memory-fails-us.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&region=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

It begins by exonerating Neil DeGrasse Tyson for smearing Bush by backing up his defense that he had confused the president’s tribute to the dead astronauts with a remark about Muslims that he never made. The problem with this defense is that the two remarks “Our God is the God who named the stars” and “the same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today” are different.

Furthermore Tyson’s critics had found a whole list of similar problems with his public statements, including various versions of the same story about jury duty that had supposedly happened to him.

But the absurd cover-up hits new heights when it references Hillary Clinton’s fake sniper incident.

Politicians are often caught misremembering their past, in part because their lives are so well documented. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign was momentarily sidetracked by her own false memory of a time when, on a trip to Bosnia as first lady, she had to skip a greeting ceremony and run from her plane under sniper fire. As often happens, her memory was an embellishment of a real event, a hooked fish that got bigger in the retelling — there was fighting in the region, but not close enough to be a threat. Our memories tend to morph to match our beliefs about ourselves and our world. Mrs. Clinton did go to dangerous places, but on the tarmac in Bosnia she was met by children, not bullets.

Hillary Clinton is a civilian, if she had ever been under fire, she would have remembered it.

There was nothing to embellish here because there was no truth whatsoever to her story. Not even on a Tysonesque level. Claiming that you were under sniper fire when you weren’t is a lie.



It’s not possible to confuse being met by children with being met by sniper fire.

Whether or not there was fighting elsewhere doesn’t matter because she never experienced it. Claiming falsely to have been carjacked doesn’t mean your statement becomes partly true if someone else was carjacked elsewhere in the city.

That’s an absurd level of reality distortion even for the New York Times.

Furthermore Hillary Clinton had a long, long record of lies. When dealing with a compulsive liar, it’s ridiculous to take one lie out of context and try to make excuses for it.


by Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.