Say Anything Blog

We all remember the “Tuzla Dash” controversy during the campaign that had then-Senator and now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claiming to have dodged sniper fire after landing at Tuzla Air Base in Bosnia-Herzegovina during a visit to the troops there as First Lady in 1996.  Eventually Hillary was forced to admit that nobody was shooting at her or her travel mates Chelsea Clinton and comedian Sinbad and that there was never any danger.

But apparently Hillary hasn’t learned her lesson when it comes to exaggerating her daring international exploits.  She claimed that in 1995 her and her husband President Clinton stayed in a hotel in Belfast that was still undergoing repairs from an IRA bombing.  The problem?  The repairs were completed nearly two years before the Clintons checked in.

...according to the Sunday Life newspaper, during a speech she made to the Stormont parliament she said that Belfast’s landmark Europa Hotel was devastated by an explosion when she first stayed there in 1995.

The Europa, where most journalists covering the decades-long conflict stayed, was famed as Europe’s most bombed hotel, earning the moniker “the Hardboard Hotel”.

However, the last Provisional IRA bomb to damage the Europa was detonated in 1993, two years before President Clinton and his wife checked in for the night.

The last time the Europa underwent renovations because of bomb blast damage was in January 1994, 22 months before the presidential entourage booked 110 rooms at the hotel.

Mrs Clinton told assembled politicians at Stormont: “When Bill and I first came to Belfast we stayed at the Europa Hotel … even though then there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs.”

So why can’t Hillary just tell the truth?  Given that she’s a world leader and that every one of her statements typically undergoes intense scrutiny you’d think she’d learn.  But, she’s a Clinton.  And truth-telling doesn’t come easy.

Personally, I think Hillary has an inferiority complex driven by the fact that she was just the First Lady under her husband and thus doesn’t get a lot of credit for his accomplishments.  And, for the most part, she shouldn’t get credit for it.

But she wants it.  She wants it so bad she’s willing to make up bogus stories to get out of her husband’s shadow, but really just ends up shooting herself in the foot every time she tries.