Jan 15, 2008 03:36 AM
by Stefan Beck
This election season, I find myself in the very unusual position of feeling that none of the candidates would be an absolute disaster, though I do dislike most of them. Hillary Clinton is the only one I have a significant problem with—as I’ve suggested here—despite the entreaties of my friend Michael Weiss, whose many virtues I never tire of reiterating to TNC readers. Christopher Hitchens, himself among Weiss’s friends and fans, makes as strong a case against Mrs. Clinton as you’re likely to encounter:
Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy “experience”—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim “worked” well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton’s memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.
Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: “It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.”
This isn’t Hitchens’s case. It’s more of an aside, really, though I think it’s an illustrative one. Do we want a president who will say, or allow someone else to say, with a straight face, that self-mythologizing is as good as the truth? Sweet family stories are typically things half-remembered and repeated privately in the knowledge that they are half-true, not things that never had a shred of credibility to begin with. There is spin, and then there is pitiful, incompetent, bald—or is it mangy?—lying. That’s what this episode represents. It’s just the beginning, as you’ll see if you do the right think as a citizen and follow the link.