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Hillary Clinton is the current front-runner for the Democrat nomination for President in 2016.  A breathless media is depicting her nomination and ascent to the presidency as inevitable, a foregone conclusion.  In light of this early near-coronation, it might be useful to learn a bit about Mrs. Clinton, and as the Obama disaster creaks and wobbles toward its conclusion, I’ll do my part to inform the public about she who would be queen.

Barack Obama, a man of no discernable accomplishments, was elected primarily because he was black and the media assisted him in painting himself as everything to everyone, and inevitable, a redeemer of all of America’s racial sins.  Will the same happen for Hillary Clinton?  She, like Mr. Obama, has virtually no actual accomplishments–though she has held several lofty titles–and will surely run as the inevitable female candidate that America has been waiting for to expiate its collective guilt over its sins against women.  It was time for American to elect a Black president, now it will suddenly be time for America to elect a female president.

It has long been common knowledge that Mrs. Clinton has a turbulent relationship with the truth.  You have no idea.  Consider this article from Jerry Zeifman–no Republican supporter he–at Accuracy In Media from 2008:

I have just seen Hillary Clinton
and her former Yale law professor both in tears at a campaign rally
here in my home state of Connecticut. Her tearful professor said how
proud he was that his former student was likely to become our next President. 
Hillary responded in tears.

My own reaction
was of regret that, when I terminated her employment on the Nixon impeachment
staff, I had not reported her unethical practices to the appropriate
bar associations.

I’ll let you, gentle readers, take the link and read Ziefman’s entire article.  For brevity’s sake, here’s a summary of his charges from World Net Daily, also from 2008:  

Details of Hillary Clinton’s firing from the House Judiciary Committee staff for unethical behavior as she helped prepare articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon have been confirmed by the panel’s chief Republican counsel.

Franklin Polk backed up major claims by Jerry Zeifman, the general counsel and chief of staff
of the House Judiciary Committee who supervised Clinton’s work on the Watergate investigation in 1974, reported columnist Dan Calabrese in a column republished by WND.

Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, called Clinton a ‘liar’ and ‘an unethical, dishonest lawyer.’

He contends Clinton was collaborating with allies of the Kennedys to block revelation of Kennedy-administration activities that made Watergate “look like a day at the beach.”

Her brief, Zeifman said, was so fraudulent and ridiculous, she would have been disbarred if she had submitted it to a judge.

Interesting charges, charges that virtually no one heard about when Mrs. Clinton was running for President in 2008.  Allegations of file hording and hiding, by 2008 a long-known Clinton tactic, were also made:

Polk confirmed Clinton wrote a brief arguing Nixon should not be granted legal counsel due to a lack of precedent. But Clinton deliberately ignored the then-recent case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who was allowed to have a lawyer during the impeachment attempt against him in 1970.

Moreover, Zeifman claims Clinton bolstered her fraudulent brief by removing all of the Douglas files from public access and storing them at her office, enabling her to argue as if the case never existed.

Polk confirmed the Clinton memo ignored the Douglas case, but he could not confirm or dispel the claim that Hillary removed the files.

This next bit of information surely qualifies for the Capt. Louis Renault Award.  I’m shocked, shocked(!) to learn:

The columnist, editor in chief of the North Star Writers Group, noted Zeifman has been ‘trying to tell his story for many years, and the mainstream media have ignored him.

This too is worthy of a Louis Renault Award:

Zeifman said Clinton, then 27, was hired to work on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who also was Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick case.

When the Watergate probe concluded, Zeifman said, he fired Clinton from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation. She was one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career, Calabrese pointed out.

Zeifman told the columnist he fired Clinton because she was a liar. [emphasis mine]

‘She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer,’ Zeifman said. “She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.’

Zeifman said Clinton collaborated with several individuals, including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel Bernard Nussbaum, who later became counsel in the Clinton White House. Their aim, he said, was the seemingly implausible scheme to deny Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.’  [skip]

Polk regarded Clinton’s memo as dishonest because it tried to pretend the Douglas precedent didn’t exist. But, unlike Zeifman, he considered it more stupid than sinister.

‘Hillary should have mentioned [the Douglas case] and then tried to argue whether that was a change of policy or not instead of just ignoring it and taking the precedent out of the opinion,’  Polk told Calabrese.

By all means, take the link and read the WND article as well.

Also of interest is the tale of Hillary as the Lion of Tuzla.  It was a lie Hillary often repeated to the effect that when she visited Tuzla, Bosnia, she was under sniper fire and ran a harrowing gauntlet.  Not quite, as The Telegraph reports from 2008:  

Hillary Clinton has conceded that she ‘did misspeak’ about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire, blaming tiredness for a dramatic description that was shown to have been significantly exaggerated.

The Democratic candidate is engaged in a frantic damage-limitation exercise amid widespread derision of her comments about a visit to Tuzla in 1996.

‘I remember landing under sniper fire,’ she said in Washington on Monday. ‘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.’

News footage of the event however showed her claims to have been wide of the mark, and reporters who accompanied her stated that there was no sniper fire. Her account was ridiculed by ABC News as ‘like a scene from Saving Private Ryan’.

After initially dismissing the controversy over her comments as a ‘minor blip’, she told a Pittsburgh radio station: ‘You know I have written about this and described it in many different settings and I did misspeak the other day. This has been a very long campaign. Occasionally, I am a human being like everybody else.’

She insisted it was the ‘first time in 12 years’ she had spoken inaccurately about the trip.

Hillary Clinton under withering sniper fire...

Hillary Clinton under withering sniper fire…

Right.  Here’s a photograph taken at the time immediately after Mrs. Clinton left the aircraft.  It would seem that sniper fire is so common as not to rate so much as ducking, to say nothing of seeking cover.  But Mrs. Clinton merely “misspoke,” just once:

But her Bosnia anecdote has been a regular feature of her stump speeches.

On the trip, the then First Lady and her daughter Chelsea, then 16, emerged smiling from a C-17 transport plane to be met by Emina Bicakcic, eight, who told them: ‘There is peace now because Mr Clinton signed it. All this peace. I love it.’

The Clintons were accompanied on the visit by the comedian Sinbad and the singer Sheryl Crow, who gave a morale-boosting concert for the troops.

On Feb 29 she stated that the greeting ceremony ‘had to be moved inside because of sniper fire’ while on Dec 29 she said that she had ‘landed in one of those corkscrew landings and ran out because they said there might be sniper fire’.

Mrs Clinton told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that she had made the mistake about sniper fire because she had been ‘sleep-deprived’. Her schedule showed she had no public engagements the day before her Washington speech and she spent the night in her Embassy Row home.

Hmm.  It would appear that Mrs. Clinton was deprived of honesty rather than sleep, but that wasn’t her only lie about foreign affairs:  [skip]

“Mrs. Clinton had cited the Bosnia trip, along with having been ‘instrumental’ in bringing peace to Northern Ireland, as a central foreign policy qualification and a reason she would be ‘ready on day one’ to be American commander-in-chief.

Hillary Clinton made peace in Northern Ireland?  The Washington Post, hardly a left-leaning paper, was less than impressed:  

Hillary is making a lot more of her Northern Ireland role on the campaign trail than she did in her memoir ‘Living History.’ As the Boston Globe recently noted, her stories of bringing Protestant and Catholic women together have become more dramatic with each retelling. The claim that she brought Catholics and Protestants together “for the first time” seems dubious. This would not be the first time that she has mixed up her chronology.

The Pinocchio Test

Hillary Clinton seems to be overstating her significance as a catalyst in the Northern Ireland peace process, which was more symbolic than substantive. On the other hand, she did play a helpful role at the margins, by encouraging organizations like Vital Voices, a women’s group that takes a stand against extremism. One Pinocchio for exaggeration.

It will be interesting indeed to learn what manner of diplomatic miracles Mrs. Clinton wrought as Secretary of State.  These, gentle readers, are far from the only examples of a life lived by the lie.  I’ll continue to allow Mrs. Clinton’s words and actions to define her character in these pages.