Clinton lies for all to see on YouTube

A week since I last blogged: where's the time gone? I'm going international with this entry which is something I don't do that often. But I can't ignore the story of how one of America's serial liars, Hillary Clinton, has recently been caught out. It all centres of course around her repeated claim of visiting Bosnia in the nineties when husband Bill was US President and landing with her daughter Chelsea under sniper fire. Unfortunately for this absolutely appalling woman film footage has been unearthed showing her story to be totally bogus, she didn't have to run to avoid the bullets, in fact everything was calm and under control. If you were to type 'Hilary Clinton Bosnia' into YouTube you would be confronted with numerous videos showing the reality of the situation. There are one or two very good spoof videos too.

So how has Mrs Clinton reacted since she was found out? Apparently she "mis-spoke". I think I'll add that to my lexicon, just in case I'm rumbled telling porkies. Seriously though she and Bill ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman") will tell any number of barefaced lies in advancing their cause. Just a couple of other examples from that loathsome woman: she had said that she was named Hillary after Sir Edmund Hillary who it will be recalled was one of the two men to conquer Everest in May 1953, the other person being Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. However Hillary Rodham Clinton was born in October 1947 when Edmund wasn't a household name. Another instance of her deliberate lying: she said that daughter Chelsea was jogging around the World Trade Centre on September 11 2001. No she wasn't. Chelsea was at home watching the tragedy unfold on television.

Clinton's premier crime which has raised the hackles of so many is her absolutely blatant lying to push forward her personal agenda. But second to that, and far less commented on, is her total lack of judgment in thinking that she could just get away with it. Surely she and her advisers were aware of the film crews in Bosnia when she made her visit and that at some stage the reality would be broadcast. This is where the internet becomes all powerful - as I noted earlier there are a number of places on YouTube where you can view the film footage and also some of the subsequent fallout. One of these videos alone has had almost 2 million hits at the time of writing. In the old days it would be possible to hope that most people might forget such lies, radio and newspaper reports would not always have a lasting effect. But in this highly visual age things are very different. It only takes seconds with a broadband connection to view the footage and the film isn't going to vanish from this site anytime soon.

Perhaps I ought to comment at this point that yes politicians habitually lie, it's stock in trade for them. Take Tony Blair and Iraq for example. We know without doubt that the dossiers on WMD were "sexed up" to use that oft repeated phrase. But I believe that the seeds for Blair's mistaken Iraq adventure were sown a few years before in Kosovo of all places. Why? He and his wife visited the heavily oppressed people in that part of the Balkans and from that point on Blair believed, rightly or wrongly, that our foreign policy should be an interventionist one, for him it was all about a moral crusade. I think with Iraq it was the fact that Saddam was a tyrant that partly drove his policy and not entirely being Bush's "poodle". In Mr Blair's case therefore blurring of some facts, massive over emphasis on others, was all part and parcel of the necessity in his eyes of removing Saddam. Don't get me wrong, I'm no apologist for Blair, once it became clear that Saddam was never a threat to the west I was very firmly on the side of the anti-war folk. But I think Blair thought he was taking this country into war for a just cause even though deceiving the population on such a serious matter as going to war is in itself a very serious matter.

With the Clintons though any lies will do in order to get your sticky fingers on the levers of power. I believe that the next test of democratic opinion regarding whether it should be 'Obama' or 'Clinton' is on 22nd April in Pennsylvania. Let's hope that Clinton is soundly defeated.