Bill Still Trying to Undo Hillary's Candidacy

A long time ago I wrote a piece questioning whether Bill Clinton had a subconscious need to torpedo Hillary's run for the president. I think I was on to something back then.

Why in the world would he bring up snipergate in a speech yesterday just as the whole thing was going away?

Former President Bill Clinton gave a passionate defense Thursday of his wife’s claim about “landing under sniper fire” – just as the damaging controversy was dying down.

Bill Clinton said the news media treated her like she’d “robbed a bank” and claimed she was experiencing end-of-day fatigue, even though she had made the claim in morning speeches.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) acknowledged two weeks ago that she “misspoke” and “made a mistake” in her overly vivid account of the 1996 landing in Tuzla, Bosnia, during a goodwill mission as first lady.

Video of a tranquil arrival ceremony refuted the claim, and her comments hurt her struggling campaign by reviving questions about her candor.

Now, her husband has revived the issue by claiming the comments were true during a “Solutions for America” campaign event in at Boonville High School in Boonville, Ind. Here are his comments, recorded by networks and reported by CBS News:

"You know, I got tickled the other day. A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me. But there was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated — and immediately apologized for it — what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995 [sic]. Did y'all see all that? Oh, they blew it up.

"Let me just tell you. The president of Bosnia and General Wesley Clark – who was there making peace where we'd lost three peacekeepers, who had to ride on a dangerous mountain road because it was too dangerous to go the regular, safe way – both defended her because they pointed out that when her plane landed in Bosnia, she had to go up to the bulletproof part of the plane, in the front. Everybody else had to put their flak jackets underneath the seat in case they got shot at. And everywhere they went, they were covered by Apache helicopters. So they just abbreviated the arrival ceremony.

"Now I say that because, what really has mattered is that even then she was interested in our troops. And I think she was the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone. And you woulda thought, you know, that she'd robbed a bank the way they carried on about this. And some of them, when they're 60, they'll forget something when they're tired at 11 at night, too.”

CBS News producer Ryan Corsaro, who covers Senator Clinton, reports she made the claim in mid-morning on St. Patrick’s Day.

CBS also has aired videotape of the senator making the claim on at least two other occasions.

The Eleanor Roosevelt claim also has been questioned, since Pat Nixon traveled to Vietnam in 1969.

The guy is sick and needs the kind of help that becoming "First Man" won't give him.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty adds this:

(Chuck) Todd asks, "Watching Bill on the trail makes folks wonder whether he could have held up to scrutiny in 1992 had YouTube and instant fact-checking existed back then. No one has seemed less prepared for the intense scrutiny of this campaign than Bill."

Come on. Back then, people did check Clinton's facts and call him on his lies and exaggerations; the folks doing it were people like Rush Limbaugh, magazines like National Review, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard (a few years later), Human Events, newspapers like The Washington Times and some days, The Wall Street Journal... Sometimes they had help from the occasional voice in a mainstream institution like William Safire at the New York Times, or half the Capital Gang on CNN, or a few others... But most of the mainstream media just wasn't interested in pointing out when Bill Clinton got the facts wrong. The fact-checkers just didn't have the added firepower that came along later with Drudge, Fox News, the plethora of talk radio voices, the blogs, NRO, etc.