Hillary, Countess Of Chappaqua, Gets Caught Lying Again!

Hillary, the Countess Of Chappaqua, has been caught telling more whoppers. This latest fish story began on March 17, when she said this about a fact-finding trip junket she and her daughter Chelsea made to Bosnia back in '96:

"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."--Hillary Clinton, speech at George Washington University, March 17, 2008.

Hillary Clinton has been regaling supporters on the campaign trail with hair-raising tales of a trip she made to Bosnia in March 1996. In her retelling, she was sent to places that her husband, President Clinton, could not go because they were "too dangerous."

When her account was challenged by one of her traveling companions, the comedian Sinbad, she upped the ante and injected even more drama into the story. In a speech earlier this week, she talked about "landing under sniper fire" and running for safety with "our heads down."

The Washington Post decided to look into her claims of heroism under fire, and found them to be completely bogus, as reporter Michael Dobbs attests:

As a reporter who visited Bosnia soon after the December 1995 Dayton Peace agreement, I can attest that the physical risks were minimal during this period, particularly at a heavily fortified U.S. Air Force base, such as Tuzla. Contrary to the claims of Hillary Clinton and former Army secretary Togo West, Bosnia was not "too dangerous" a place for President Clinton to visit in early 1996. In fact, the first Clinton to visit the Tuzla Air Force base was not Hillary, but Bill, on January 13, 1996.

Had Hillary Clinton's plane come "under sniper fire" in March 1996, we would certainly have heard about it long before now. Numerous reporters, including the Washington Post's John Pomfret, covered her trip. A review of nearly 100 news accounts of her visit shows that not a single newspaper or television station reported any security threat to the First Lady. "As a former AP wire service hack, I can safely say that it would have been in my lead had anything like that happened," said Pomfret.

According to Pomfret, the Tuzla airport was "one of the safest places in Bosnia" in March 1996, and "firmly under the control" of the 1st Armored Division.

Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An eight-year-old Moslem girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony, above, shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss.

"There is peace now," Emina told Clinton, according to Pomfret's report in the Washington Post the following day, "because Mr. Clinton signed it. All this peace. I love it."

The First Lady's schedule, released on Wednesday and available here, confirms that she arrived in Tuzla at 8.45 a.m. and was greeted by various dignitaries, including Emina Bicakcic, (whose name has mysteriously been redacted from the document.)

You can see CBS News footage of the arrival ceremony here. The footage shows Clinton walking calmly out of the back of the C-17 military transport plane that brought her from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

Among the U.S. officials on hand to greet Clinton at the airport was Maj. Gen. William Nash, the commander of U.S. troops in Bosnia. Nash told me that he was unaware of any security threat to Clinton during her eight-hour stay in Tuzla. He said, however, that Clinton had a "busy schedule" and may have got the impression that she was being hurried on her way. See clarification below.

According to Sinbad, who provided entertainment on the trip along with the singer Sheryl Crow, the "scariest" part was deciding where to eat. As he told Mary Ann Akers of The Post, "I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place.'" Sinbad questioned the premise behind the Clinton version of events. "What kind of president would say 'Hey man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife. Oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you."

Replying to Sinbad earlier this week, Clinton dismissed him as "a comedian." Her campaign referred me to Togo West, who was also on the trip and is a staunch Hillary supporter. West could not remember "sniper fire" himself, but said there was no reason to doubt the First Lady's version of events. "Everybody's perceptions are different," he told me.

Clinton made no mention of "sniper fire" in her autobiography "Living History," published in 2003, although she did say there were "reports of snipers" in the hills around the airport.

Hillary Rodham-Clinton's revisionist attempt to turn what was a simple goodwill trip back in '96 into some sort of earth-shaking foreign-policy coup-de-etat on behalf of her serially-philandering "husband" is laughable.

We agree with the Washington Post's assessment of "Four Pinnochios" (see rating criteria here) for the "whoppers" which she told concerning that particular fact finding trip junket.

And should Hillary, the Countess of Chappaqua, somehow become our President, we can expect many more of these types of falsehoods.

Washington Watch: Another Hypocrite Exposed

Apparently, Idaho's senator Larry Craig was attempting to do a little unauthorized "exit polling" in a public restroom recently:

Sen. Larry Craig said that he "overreacted and made a poor decision" in pleading guilty to disorderly conduct after his June arrest following an incident in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.

Tuesday, in his first public statement on the arrest, the Idaho Republican said he did nothing "inappropriate."

"Let me be clear: I am not gay and never have been," said Craig, who has aligned himself with conservative groups who oppose gay rights.

With his wife by his side, Craig said he is the victim of a "witch hunt" conducted by the Idaho Statesman newspaper.

"In pleading guilty, I overreacted in Minneapolis, because of the stress of the Idaho Statesman's investigation and the rumors it has fueled around Idaho," he said. "Again, that overreaction was a mistake, and I apologize for my misjudgment."

He added: "I should not have kept this arrest to myself, and should have told my family and friends about it. I wasn't eager to share this failure, but I should have done so anyway."

A police officer who arrested him June 11 said Craig peered through a crack in a restroom stall door for two minutes and made gestures suggesting to the officer he wanted to engage in "lewd conduct."

Craig's blue eyes were clearly visible through the crack in the door, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport police Sgt. Dave Karsnia wrote in the report he filed.

"Craig would look down at his hands, 'fidget' with his fingers, and then look through the crack into my stall again," Karsnia wrote in documents accompanying the arrest report.

Craig said the officer misinterpreted his actions.

After he was taken for questioning, the police report says, Craig pulled out of a Senate business card and asked the officer: "What do you think of that?"

Senate Republican leaders are calling for an ethics committee review. A GOP leadership aide said senators were especially concerned about the business card allegation.

The aide said the leadership discussed the matter by phone and decided to call for an investigation because they were concerned that Craig pleaded guilty and disputes the facts.

The GOP leadership consists of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Assistant Minority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, Conference Chairman Jon Kyl of Arizona, Policy Committee Chair Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, and Senatorial Committee Chair John Ensign of Nevada.

"This is a serious matter," the group said in a statement. "Due to the reported and disputed circumstances, and the legal resolution of this serious case, we will recommend that Senator Craig's incident be reported to the Senate Ethics Committee for its review.

"In the meantime, Leadership is examining other aspects of the case to determine if additional action is required," the statement said.

Craig, 62, pleaded guilty August 8 to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge in the incident, according to Minnesota criminal records.

The senator said he "chose to plead guilty to a lesser charge in the hope of making it go away. I did not seek any counsel, either from an attorney, staff, friends, or family. That was a mistake, and I deeply regret it."

On Tuesday, Craig announced that he has retained an attorney.

The officer wrote that he was on a plainclothes detail in the restroom because of citizen complaints and arrests for sexual activity there.

Karsnia wrote that when the person occupying the stall beside him left, Craig entered it and blocked the door with his rolling suitcase.

"My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of their stall," the officer said in his report.

The senator then tapped his right foot, "a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct," Karsnia wrote, and Craig ran his left hand several times underneath the partition dividing the stalls.

"The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot, which was within my stall area," the officer's report said.

When the police interviewed him later, the senator said that "he has a wide stance when going to the bathroom" and that was why his foot may have touched the officer's, the report said.

Craig also told police that he had reached down to the floor to pick up a piece of paper, the officer wrote.

"It should be noted that there was not a piece of paper on the bathroom floor, nor did Craig pick up a piece of paper," Karsnia wrote.

"During the interview, Craig either disagreed with me or 'didn't recall' the events as they happened."

After Craig ran his hand underneath the partition wall three times, Karsnia held his police identification down by the floor so the senator could see it, the report said.

"With my left hand near the floor, I pointed towards the exit. Craig responded, 'No!'

"I again pointed towards the exit. Craig exited the stall with his roller bags without flushing the toilet," Karsnia wrote.

The senator initially resisted the officer's request to go to the police operations center, he said, but finally did. There, he was read his Miranda rights, interviewed, photographed, fingerprinted and released, the report said.

As a traditional American conservative, I find the senator's alleged confessed actions to be particularly egregious.

It's bad enough when the opposition commits acts such as this (likely felon and impeached president Bill Clinton, for example) but when those who represent themselves as being strong supporters of traditional conservative values are exposed for being the hypocrites that they are, their lies and cover-ups only serve to provide Democrats with useful campaign fodder in their efforts to obtain further electoral victories and thereby obtain the legislative/judicial power that they crave in order to fundamentally re-orient the country in a leftward direction.

As a sitting United States Senator, Larry Craig should be held to a higher ethical standard than that of private citizens.

Craig should have known better.

And if the senator was innocent, then he certainly would not have copped a plea. I strongly believe that an innocent man (or woman) would never accept punishment for a crime that he or she did not do.

In my view, the man is guilty as confessed.

Senator Craig's actions are just the latest example of what is going-on in that cesspool of iniquity that is known as Babylon on the Potomac Washington, D.C.

So now, like all-too-many of the wealthy and powerful who have been caught engaging in deviant/criminal behavior, (such as pseudo-conservative, drug addict, and hypocrite Rush Limbaugh) Craig has hired an attorney in order to beat the rap.

Craig should not be allowed a "do over" merely because the MSM finally exposed him. He should "man-up" (so to speak) and (unlike Limbaugh) accept the consequences.

When pseudo-conservatives such as Larry Craig, Rush Limbaugh, and the hooker-chasing Senator David Vitter preach one thing and get caught doing another, their behavior only serves to further undermine the Conservative Cause.

It's time for traditional conservatives to stop justifying hypocrisy and insist that those who represent Conservatism both "talk the talk" AND "walk the walk." -----------------------------------See our latest entries.

Wonkitorial: The Latest From Babylon, D.C.

Looks like another of the Washington Crowd has been caught with his pants down hands in the hypocrisy jar:(emphasis added)

"Miz Julia" doled out a steady stream of advice, both practical and philosophical.

From her California home, she e-mailed tips to the 132 women who worked across the Washington area for the firm Pamela Martin & Associates. Her newsletters, now excerpted in court records, were a virtual how-to manual for avoiding all kinds of trouble in a business said to specialize in erotic fantasies.

"One never quite knows where evil, i.e., the vice squad is lurking in this business," read one arch entry from 1995. "The misogynists get a real kick out of surprising (shocking) you girls, when you give them the opportunity!!! . . . Therefore, you are to lock, double lock, triple lock all doors!!! . . . Figure it out, before they 'get cha'!!!"

Miz Julia was the pseudonym for Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the woman at the center of a sex scandal that has caused a deputy secretary of state to resign and has lawyers calling around town trying to keep their clients' names out of public view. A one-time law student, Palfrey ran for 13 years what she insists was a legal escort service. Federal prosecutors allege she was providing $300-an-hour prostitutes, and a grand jury indicted her in February on federal racketeering charges.

Palfrey piqued fascination -- and anxiety -- by first threatening to sell phone records that could unveil thousands of clients, and then handing them over, apparently for free, to ABC News. She is scheduled to appear tomorrow in U.S. District Court in the District.

On Friday, Randall L. Tobias resigned as deputy secretary of state one day after confirming to Brian Ross of ABC that he had patronized the Pamela Martin firm. Speaking yesterday on "Good Morning America," Ross said Tobias told him Tobias's number was on Palfrey's phone records because he had called "to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage." There had been "no sex," Ross quoted Tobias as saying, and that recently he has used another service, "with Central American gals," for massages.

Tobias, who is 65 and married, was director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. He previously held a top job in the Bush administration overseeing AIDS relief, in which he promoted abstinence and a policy requiring grant recipients to swear they oppose prostitution.

Palfrey's flamboyant attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, said Friday that he has been contacted by five lawyers recently, asking whether their clients' names are on Palfrey's list of 10,000 to 15,000 phone numbers. Some, Sibley said, have inquired about whether accommodations could be made to keep their identities private. ABC is expected to air a report on Palfrey and her clients on "20/20" on May 4, during sweeps.

More revelations are in the offing. Ross said the list includes the names of some "very prominent people," as well as a number of women with "important and serious jobs" who had worked as escorts for the firm.

Read the backstory about this whole sorry episode right here.

This is just another incident that seems to support the idea that over the past few decades, Washington Babylon-on-the-Potomac has become little more than a cesspool of non-stop depravity, cronyism, reckless spending of the public's money, and gross administrative incompetence.

While our nation is in the middle of a supposed "war" on terror in which thousands of our nation's young people are getting killed and maimed due to a lack of proper equipment, (such as up-armored combat-ready vehicles) the Washington Crowd New Babylonians seemingly do little else besides party, travel on taxpayer-financed sightseeing junkets, and play endless rounds of employer-employee grab-ass while marking time in their plushly-appointed (again, at taxpayer expense) office suites.

In his first inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan said, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Mr. Regan went on to say:

"We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we're sick--professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, "we the people," this breed called Americans.

So, as we begin, let us take inventory. We are a nation that has a government--not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.

It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government..."

During the 1992 Presidential campaign, which ended-up being won by Bill Clinton, (who just may be the most morally bankrupt man to ever hold the office) then-candidate Ross Perot spoke about the need for someone to go to Washington Babylon-on-the-Potomac and, in his words, "clean-out the barn."

President Reagan's call to reign-in an arrogant and increasingly overbearing federal government continues to resonate today while that barn of which Mr. Perot spoke about is still in need of a thorough cleaning.

We hope that any and all of those who are involved (be they Democrats or Republicans) in this latest scandal among the nation's ruling so-called "elite" are exposed and held up to the public ridicule that they so richly deserve at the hands of the hard-working, over-taxed, and over-regulated folks who live out here in what these Washingtonians New Babylonians sneeringly refer to (while in attendance at any one of their numberless pickup-parties-in-the-guise-of-office-cocktail-mixers) as "fly-over country."

Stay tuned. -----------------------------See our latest posts.

Hypocrite Alert: That Romney Don't Hunt!

The nearly endless presidential election cycle is hardly underway and already the lying has begun:

BOSTON - To hear Mitt Romney talk on the campaign trail, you might think the Republican presidential candidate had a gun rack in the back of his pickup truck.

"I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I've been a hunter pretty much all my life," he said this week in Keene, N.H., to a man sporting a National Rifle Association cap.

Yet the former Massachusetts governor's hunting experience is limited to two trips at the bookends of his 60 years: as a 15-year-old, when he hunted rabbits with his cousins on a ranch in Idaho, and last year, when he shot quail on a fenced game preserve in Georgia.

Last year's trip was an outing with major donors to the Republican Governors Association, which Romney headed at the time.

An aide said Wednesday that Romney was not trying to mislead anyone, although he confirmed Romney had been hunting only on those occasions in his life.

Read all about the lying over there.

Where's a candidate like this guy or like that one when our Country so desperately needs him or her?

Perhaps an honest-to-goodness statesman (or woman) will emerge from the pack this time around.

Oh... that's right.... we nearly forgot two little (but vitally important) factors problems: the states of Iowa and New Hampshire think that they have a God-given right to pretty much determine which two candidates that the rest of us out here in the other 48 states get to vote for (or against) every four years.

And for the better part of the next 19 months, the candidates will spend countless days crossing and re-crossing each and every village, town, hardware store, diner, pig-trail, feed-lot, and arrogant little hamlet of those two mostly rural states while lying through their teeth pandering to the interests of the 3 million (about the same number as the city of Chicago) or so mostly rural, mostly smug, often condescending voters who have gotten very spoiled used to having a full-slate of candidates routinely show-up every election cycle in order to drop vast sums of money chasing so relatively few (and unrepresentative of the rest of the country's) votes.

If past history is any indicator of future performance, most candidates will quit within a few days of New Hampshire's January primary, leaving only one (or two) viable candidates in each party's race. (And yes, we know about the vast multitude of states who have moved up their primaries this time around, which will likely only serve to further magnify the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire.)

Since the 99 percent of Americans who don't have an opportunity to participate in the Iowa caucus or the all-powerful New Hampshire primary will continue to have little or no say in the two parties' nomination process, (with a population of 45,000 people, our California town has never had a visit by a presidential contender in its 100 year history) we don't think that we'll be seeing the likes of Harry S. or Theodore anytime soon...

So... we'll most likely be getting the same type of lying weasels candidates who won't tell us the truth and have little to fear in the way of being held accountable for their dishonesty while on the way to the carefully choreographed and utterly predictable coronations freakshows that nowadays pass for the parties' nominating conventions. ----------------------------See our latest posts.

Today's Non Sequitur: Hypocrite Alert!

John Travolta, the revolting hypocrite.

Heh. Maybe that extra-large gas-guzzler jet aircraft parked in Tony Manero's Travolta's driveway is a symptom that he's compensating for something...