More Tall Tales From Hillary: Her Claimed Role in Irish Peace Process Critically Examined
 
She once claimed that her mother named her after the famous mountaineer. When it was pointed out that Sir Edmund didn’t scale Mount Everest until after she was born, the little lie was exposed.
Hillary’s exaggerated claim that she “helped bring peace to Norther Ireland” is another example of her natural inclination for fabrication, half-truths and deception.
When Hillary adopted the phony Southern drawl in Selma last year, I described her contrivance and pretense as simply an inescapable part of the Clinton DNA:
“And therein lies one of the most vulnerable aspects of her candidacy: the absence of even a shred of authenticity. Is there any aspect of Hillary’s march to the White House that will be, genuine, sincere, spontaneous and not heavily scripted? For many Democrats, the Selma incident simply reinforces the painful answer to this question — No. In light of the reality of an alternative in Obama, the inevitable dilemma for party loyalists becomes: how do they explain, enable or continue to justify the incorrigible mendacity of the Clintons’?
There was no need to adopt the fake Southern accent, just as there was no need to say I didn’t inhale, or that President Clinton’s troubles were all caused by a vast right-wing conspiracy; nor, that Hillary was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, despite the fact the mountaineer scaled Everest some six years after Hillary was born. As they watch the tactics from the old Clinton Administration play out endlessly through the vehicle of Hillary’s candidacy, many Democrats, who out of party loyalty, were forced to bear witness to the moral fiber of their party being corroded, must now, in exasperation, say never again. As David Geffen reminded us, the Clintons’ lie with ease; close observers of this political couple also remind us of another, perhaps even more painful truth: the Clintons’ lie unnecessarily. For them, deception is a virtue.”
Her unfounded and patently false boast about having in integral role in the Irish Peace Process appears to be the subject of some withering scrutiny from one of the major participants of that Conference. Here is what Nobel Peace Prize winner Lord Trimble had to say about Hillary’s claims:
Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.
"I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around," he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely "the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets" during elections. "She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.”…
Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am.
"I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland," she told CNN on Wednesday. But negotiators from the parties that helped broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told The Daily Telegraph that her role was peripheral and that she played no part in the gruelling political talks over the years.
Lord Trimble shared the Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume, leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, in 1998. Conall McDevitt, an SDLP negotiator and aide to Mr Hume during the talks, said: "There would have been no contact with her either in person or on the phone. I was with Hume regularly during calls in the months leading up to the Good Friday Agreement when he was taking calls from the White House and they were invariably coming from the president."
 
Beacon Street Journal
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
By John Kinsellagh