You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks: Bill Clinton Resuscitates The Bosnian Sniper Story
 
There he goes again…
One of the great myths of this campaign season —endlessly repeated by the media — is that Bill Clinton is the greatest politician of his generation and, as such, his presence on the campaign trail would be an asset to Hillary. In light of his continuing gaffes, his impolitic and increasingly truculent behavior, the narrative was reprised ever so slightly to read: he would greatly facilitate Hillary's prospects for the nomination, if he was "used properly."
So, there was Bill Clinton on the stump yesterday, unperturbed by the merciless mocking his wife received when her Bosnian fabrication was exposed as a pathological lie, defending Hillary's "misstatement" as merely a harmless consequence of someone who was just sleep-deprived.
The Politico reports that at a campaign event in Boonville, Indiana, Clinton told the crowd:
"You know, I got tickled the other day. A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me. But there was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated — and immediately apologized for it — what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995 [sic]. Did y'all see all that? Oh, they blew it up. "Let me just tell you. The president of Bosnia and General Wesley Clark – who was there making peace where we'd lost three peacekeepers, who had to ride on a dangerous mountain road because it was too dangerous to go the regular, safe way –  both defended her because they pointed out that when her plane landed in Bosnia, she had to go up to the bulletproof part of the plane, in the front. Everybody else had to put their flak jackets underneath the seat in case they got shot at. And everywhere they went, they were covered by Apache helicopters. So they just abbreviated the arrival ceremony.
These are the ramblings of the greatest politician of his generation? Just as the controversy was attenuating due to its aging in the natural news life-cycle, he deliberately resuscitates it by his inexplicably bad timing. Someone needs to sit Bill down and explain to him that dissembling, prevaricating and other Clinton machinations worked well in the 90's when the press ran interference for you, but the old charm doesn't work when your enablers in the media have deserted you.
 
Beacon Street Journal
Friday, April 11, 2008
By John Kinsellagh