Another Tuzla Dash for Hillary?

Say, shouldn’t a Secretary of State increase confidence in the United States and its honesty and reliability?  Hillary Clinton gave the people of Northern Ireland a headscratching moment when she claimed to have stayed at a Belfast hotel undergoing renovations for bomb damage in 1995, when she and former President Bill Clinton arrived to help negotiate an end to the Troubles.  However, the hotel had been fully renovated a year prior to their arrival and had been attacked in 1993, according to the Times of London (via Instapundit):

Hillary Clinton has been caught out “mis-speaking” again in a manner that suggests that she hasn’t learnt from past experiences of her globe-trotting, “lily-gilding” speeches. …

But according to the Sunday Life newspaper, during a speech she made to the Stormont parliament she said that Belfast’s landmark Europa Hotel was devastated by an explosion when she first stayed there in 1995.

The Europa, where most journalists covering the decades-long conflict stayed, was famed as Europe’s most bombed hotel, earning the moniker “the Hardboard Hotel”.

However, the last Provisional IRA bomb to damage the Europa was detonated in 1993, two years before President Clinton and his wife checked in for the night.

The last time the Europa underwent renovations because of bomb blast damage was in January 1994, 22 months before the presidential entourage booked 110 rooms at the hotel.

Mrs Clinton told assembled politicians at Stormont: “When Bill and I first came to Belfast we stayed at the Europa Hotel … even though then there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs.”

This also recalls her efforts to claim some of the credit due her husband for American intervention in the Troubles.  During the campaign, Hillary used the Northern Ireland Peace Process as part of her resumé for international relations.  Lord Trimble, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in the process (when the Nobel committee gave them for actual accomplishment), called Hillary a “cheerleader” in the process, not one of the people with any substantive contribution to it.

Even the Times recalls her Tuzla Dash story, in which she aggrandized herself by claiming to have landed in a hot-fire zone.  She was forced into an embarrassing admission that Tuzla had been fully secure when she visited American troops there — which should have been obvious by the fact that she brought her 15-year-old daughter on the trip.  Before getting exposed, though, Hillary herself called the comedian Sinbad a liar for contradicting her story, which she also had to retract later.

This shows that these events on the campaign trail were no accident, but a pattern of lies told by a politician who desperately wants to feel relevant.  That’s bad enough in a politician, but it’s completely counterproductive in a diplomat.

Blowback