Ah, Bill Clinton.
Now Bill “misspoke” — twice: Stumping in Indiana yesterday, Bill Clinton resurrected the Bosnia sniper fire story, per NBC/NJ’s Mike Memoli. “[T]here 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,” he said. “Did y’all see all that? Oh, they blew it up.” He went on to say, “I think she was the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone. And you would’ve 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 11:00 at night, too.” He said something similar at a later stop.
As Chuck Todd notes, “How many things were wrong in his remarks? She didn’t just once misspeak — at 11:00 pm — about the Bosnia story; she did it numerous times, and not just at night. The trip, moreover, took place in ’96, not ’95. And Hillary wasn’t the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to visit a combat zone; Pat Nixon went to Saigon in 1969, as Politico’s Ben Smith reminds us. What was Bill thinking?”
I would also note that Hillary mentioned the sniper story in her big speech on Saint Patrick’s Day, and she didn’t retract it until many days later, not “immediately.”
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 of that era didn’t have the added firepower that came along later with Drudge, Fox News, the plethora of talk radio voices, the blogs, NRO, etc.