A Hillary in Your Cabinet

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama campaigned intoning the mantra that Washington's political system is "broken." Now with most of his appointments either named or leaked, he has proved it. There is indeed something broken in a political system whose electorate rejects Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries and nonetheless finds itself saddled with a third Clinton administration at year's end.

Of all the Clintonistas whom Obama has appointed, the most bizarre is the appointment of Sen. Clinton as secretary of state. He himself during the campaign remarked on her lack of foreign policy credentials. "What exactly is (her) foreign policy expertise?" he jeered. Obama's incoming White House counsel, Greg Craig, was blunter still. In a detailed memo last March, Craig explained why, as he put it, "There is no reason to believe … she was a key player in foreign policy at any time during the Clinton Administration." The memo led Oliver Willis, a progressive blogger, to note, "This malarkey about Sen. Clinton having all this foreign policy experience strikes me as a serial fabrication on the level of Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair" — two infamous journalistic frauds.

Those words were chosen wisely. It was in March that at least two of Sen. Clinton's claims to foreign policy credentials were exposed as the sheerest poppycock. She had been presenting herself as having been an indispensable instrument in effecting the Irish peace settlement during her husband's administration. "I was deeply involved in the Irish peace process," she boasted on the campaign trail. Unfortunately for her, Judicial Watch forced the Clintons to release Hillary's heavily redacted White House schedules, from which it was apparent that she had nothing to do with the peace process other than appearing in public with her husband sporting her infamous forced smile.

The charge that Hillary was engaged in "serial fabrication" was validated again when one of the participants in the Irish peace negotiations, Noble Peace Prize winner David Trimble, exclaimed, "I don't know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill going around." Trimble characterized her empty boasts as a "wee bit silly." Two months earlier, she had fibbed that she "actually went to Northern Ireland more often than (her) husband did" and, on one occasion, "pulled together in Belfast, in the town hall," Catholic and Protestant women whom she persuaded to bury the hatchet so "the hard work of peacemaking could move forward." That whopper provoked the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph to report, "There is no record of a meeting at Belfast City Hall, though Mrs Clinton attended a ceremony there when her husband turned on the Christmas tree lights in November 1995."

It was in last March, too, that our next secretary of state was caught BSing that 12 years before, while traveling through Bosnia as first lady, she had to dodge "sniper fire." This was a tall tale that she had been uttering repeatedly in her campaign to present herself as more experienced than Obama.

According to it, the snipers attacked at a planned "greeting ceremony" in Tuzla, which had to be canceled, as the sniper fire rained down and, said Hillary, "We just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base." Actually, the ceremony was held at the base. It was not canceled, and, with scores of journalists and dignitaries standing by, it was videotaped. CBS played the videotape. Once again, a brazen and artless lie by Hillary was her undoing. Said one member of the military, obviously peeved by Hillary's deprecation of the military's security measures, "Getting shot at by snipers is not something you forget — or make light of."

Well, Hillary trivializes a lot of serious things and is caught BSing often. In fact, except for her husband, I cannot think of another public figure of her stature caught so often in her own lies. About the same time in the primary season as the Tuzla tale, she also was caught lying that she "negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo." She was caught in fibs about advice she offered her husband during the Rwanda genocide, as well.

Now, all of the above were lies deployed by Hillary to convince the electorate that she is vastly experienced in foreign policy. Apparently, she failed to convince voters, but she seems to have convinced her erstwhile adversary, the president-elect. He should have taken note of her discrepancies and one other thing. By now, he should be aware that both Clintons cause trouble for themselves and for others nearby when there is no apparent reason for the trouble other than the Clintons' bad character. Frankly, Mr. Obama, it is not wise to be too close to these two. You are going to be sitting with Mrs. Clinton in Cabinet meetings. Watch out for sniper fire.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. To find out more about R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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