Damning: Hillary's sniper fire and NAFTA lies explored

Many of Farrakhan’s public comments are disgusting, but this is tripe even by Cohen’s own lamentable standards. Just as he did in the case of Angelou, Cohen acknowledged that “nothing in Obama’s record suggests he harbors anti-Semitic views.” He then goes on to smear Obama by (indirect) association with Farrakhan and says that if Obama doesn’t speak out against Farrakhan, the candidate will confirm Cohen’s suspicions that he has no “mettle” and “that he is a fog of a man.”

Beyond the smear job, Cohen might want to go back and read his column on Angelou, in which he generously forgave Jesse Jackson and Congressman Charles Rangel for speaking at the Million Man March. But, he wrote, “Angelou was a different matter. She is no politician or political leader. She would not have suffered at the polls if she told Farrakhan to get into his flying saucer and get the hell off the National Mall.”

“Cohen,” I wrote back in 2006, “can be an absolutely fierce bulldog—when he’s attacking soft targets like Louis Farrakhan, suicide bombers, or Nazis.” If nothing else, the man is predictable.

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Hillary: Bosnia Sniper Flap Not What Voters Want To Be Talking About

By Eric Kleefeld - March 27, 2008, 8:58AM

Hillary Clinton said in a Fox News interview shown last night that the flap over her trip to Bosnia, and previous statements that she had come under sniper fire, are not what voters want to be talking about — a sign that she recognizes the seriousness of the problems at hand, and is doing a media tour to control the damage.

"I'm a human being. I made a mistake and owned up to it," Hillary told Greta Van Susteren. "But that's not what people talk to me about. When I'm out campaigning ... people want to talk about the economy and health care, and they want to know what are you going to do to get fix our country and get it back on track, and help my family and me.

"And that what I'm really engaged in. Because, you know, when you've been on a campaign for 14 months there's all kinds of other distractions, but at the end of the day this is a hiring decision," she said.

March 27, 2008, 12:48 pm

Krazy Glue Moments

By Matt Bai

Why do some political missteps haunt their candidates forever, while others are easily put to rest? John Kerry saying he voted for the war before he voted against it, or Howard Dean screeching on a stage in Iowa, instantly becomes the stuff of political history, but when George W. Bush admits that he was once arrested for driving under the influence, it immediately fades into obscurity. Some politicians, as they used to say of Ronald Reagan, seem coated in Teflon, while others seem covered in Krazy Glue, unable to shake the stickiness of what seem like minor embarrassments.

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Then there’s Mr. Obama, who followed up his speech on race and his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, by asserting, in an interview, that his racist grandmother was a “typical white person.” Mr. Obama went on to clarify his meaning, suggesting that white Americans have been shaped by common experience with race, but the sound bite was ugly. Mr. Obama has presented himself to the electorate chiefly as a bridge between races and political cultures, a harbinger of the end of identity politics, but his struggle to explain the racial attitudes of his own family and friends has to complicate that message. In the wake of his Philadelphia speech, Mr. Obama seemed to right himself among Democrats in national tracking polls, but the controversy could continue to resonate with white, independent voters, revealing its effects in the months ahead.

Finally, we have the story of Hillary Clinton and her bullet-dodging landing in Bosnia in 1996, which turns out to have been, in fact, a perilous descent into untruth. Mrs. Clinton has used the words “strength” and “experience” so often during the course of her campaign that they might as well be tattooed onto her knuckles. Her essential argument is that, unlike Mr. Obama, she has the foreign policy credentials to go up against Mr. McCain and win — a claim that has been dismissed by critics who assert that being first lady isn’t remotely like being secretary of defense. Fair or not, those critics got a real boost when it was revealed that at least one of her claims from that period was, at best, misremembered.

The Bosnia flap undermined Mrs. Clinton’s case for experience at a moment when she is desperately trying to convince her party’s superdelegates that she is the only Democrat who can win. Perhaps worse, though, the controversy played perfectly into an anti-Clinton narrative that Mr. Obama has peddled — namely, that Clintons, both of them, will say or do anything to win. (Exit polls from the Mississippi primary showed that half the voters questioned Mrs. Clinton’s integrity.) Even should she manage to snatch the nomination away at this late date, she can expect to run up against that same indictment from Mr. McCain in the fall, along with ads repeating her statements about Bosnia and the non-existent snipers. In other words, that one could be

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign was quick to send out an e-mail accusing Mr. Obama of making false statements in his ad, saying he has received more than $160,000 from the oil and gas companies.

Phil Singer, deputy communications director for Mrs. Clinton, put out this statement: “It’s unfortunate that Senator Obama is using false advertising to explain why he can be trusted to do something about energy prices. Senator Obama says he doesn’t take campaign contributions from oil companies, but the reality is that Exxon Mobil, Shell and others are among his donors. I wonder if they’ll fix the ad.”

Mr. Singer shouldn’t hold his breath. Bill Burton, press secretary for the Obama campaign, reaffirmed the ad’s message, saying “Senator Obama is the only candidate in the race who doesn’t accept campaign contributions from special interests PACs and Washington lobbyists, and that includes oil companies and oil lobbyists.”

“The energy bill that Senator Clinton has already been criticized for misrepresenting — one that Clinton supporters Representatives Murtha and Kanjorski also backed — actually raised taxes on oil companies and made the largest investment in renewable energy in our nation’s history,” said Mr. Burton in a statement. “Instead of continuing with the negative and misleading tactics that voters everywhere are rejecting, Senator Clinton should get behind the Obama plan to ease the burden of rising gas prices on working families.”

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Op-Ed Columnist

Hillary’s St. Patrick’s Day Massacre

By FRANK RICH
Published: March 30, 2008

MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?

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In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of “sniper fire” into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldn’t be true because by the time of the first lady’s visit in March 1996, “the war was over.” Meredith Vieira asked Mrs. Clinton on the “Today” show why, if she was on the front lines, she took along a U.S.O. performer like Sinbad. Earlier this month, a week before Mrs. Clinton fatefully rearmed those snipers one time too many, Sinbad himself spoke up to The Washington Post: “I think the only ‘red phone’ moment was: Do we eat here or at the next place?”

Yet Mrs. Clinton was undeterred. She dismissed Sinbad as a “comedian” and recycled her fiction once more on St. Patrick’s Day. When Michael Dobbs fact-checked it for The Post last weekend and proclaimed it worthy of “four Pinocchios,” her campaign pushed back. The Clinton camp enforcer Howard Wolfson phoned in to “Morning Joe” on MSNBC Monday and truculently quoted a sheaf of news stories that he said supported her account. Only later that day, a full week after her speech, did he start to retreat, suggesting it was “possible” she “misspoke” in the “most recent instance” of her retelling of her excellent Bosnia adventure.

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...The Drudge Report’s link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news program’s nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest “comeback” on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of “sleep deprivation” and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.

The Clinton campaign’s cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising. Witness the canned Hillary Web “chats” and “Hillcasts,” the soupy Web contest to choose a campaign song (the winner, an Air Canada advertising jingle sung by Celine Dion, was quickly dumped), and the little-watched electronic national town-hall meeting on the eve of Super Tuesday. Web surfers have rejected these stunts as the old-school infomercials they so blatantly are...

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