Friday, March 28, 2008

For someone so critical about honesty....

I am sure that everyone has heard about Hillary Clinton's misstatements regarding her trip to Bosnia as the first lady. If you have not heard about it, Hillary recalled landing in Bosnia under sniper fire and having to duck and run to the car, missing out on the planned reception. However, there is taped footage of Hillary walking rather relaxed towards a large reception including young children, and none of the video footage shows anything even close to sniper attacks. This video shows the speech where she discussed the event and the original footage of the actual event.



Normally, I do not pay too much attention to issues such as these in the political arena. I tend to get frustrated when the media latches onto a problem like this one and circulates it over and over again. However, this really bothered me because of Hillary's judgment of Obama throughout this entire campaign, attacking him left and right with any piece of negative news she can find. Here, she flat out lies at a speech and after she was caught stated that she says millions of things each day and she must have misspoke. Misspeaking is one thing, fabricating a story that did not take place to somehow look like a political hero is another. Hillary seemed particularly offended when Obama used words form Deval Patrick in his speech, and perhaps rightfully so since the words were not his own. I am assuming that Hillary felt that this plagiarism represented a kind of dishonesty that she felt does not belong politics. However, if you are going to take the moral high ground in such a situation you should probably make sure not to blatantly lie on national television. As we all know, this is not the first time that this has happened and Hillary has been called out for lying on several occasions. Yet, I have not seen Obama using these stories to tear Hillary down as she often does to him, but then again that is apparently "just politics." I do not think Obama feels it necessary to say too much about this event, because clearly, Hillary has said enough.

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