Bill's Damaging Damage Control: Update

Just when everybody was ready to move on from Tusla, Bosnia, and Hillary Clinton's "misstatements" thereof, Bill Clinton took to the microphone in Indiana yesterday and offered a strange defense of his wife's faulty recollections. From Politico, we have the former president's rather oddly-timed explanation:

And, 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 at night when she was exhausted, misstated and immediately apologized for it, what heppened to her in Bosnia in 1995. Did y'all see that? Oh, they blew it up...

...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.

Ben Smith, who is not yet 60 years old, judging from his big-headed illustration, succinctly knocks down the bulk of B.C.'s assertions in one felll swoop:

For those who forgot about the Tuzla rabbit hole, the speech where she got in trouble for "misspeaking" about arriving under sniper fire was in the morning, she told the story more than once, she didn't acknowledge that she misspoke until more than a week after giving the speech (and long after the comedian Sinbad had disputed her recollections of the Bosnia trip), ...and Pat Nixon visited Saigon in 1969.

But sure, hey, it's all the media's fault. Of course, irony of ironies, Bill's bizarre explanation of Hillary's actions now puts him in the identical situation that his wife already faced. We are left to wonder how long it will take him to spin his own faulty memory and factual inaccuracies over an issue that was, until his remarks, finally off the political radar. Will Chelsea now offer a third recounting of the trip so that we'll never be rid of this story? Video added after the jump.

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ABC's Jake Tapper has just concluded his own dissecting of Bill's dissembling. He counts 8 misstatements in the defense of the original misstatements.


UPDATE: Late in the day comes word that Hillary isn't happy, yet again, about her loose-canon of a husband. From NBC:

The former president said that his wife called him last night to ask him to let the issue lie. "Hillary called me and said 'You don't remember this. You weren't there, let me handle it.' I said, 'Yes ma'am,' Clinton said.

Then again, Hillary's memory is the thing that started this mess in the first palce.


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