I saw on the news early this morning that Hillary Clinton is under fire from the media for exaggerating the danger of her trip to Bosnia as First Lady back in the 1990s. It seems that she was telling tales of corkscrew landings and warnings of sniper fire in her stump speeches, making it all sound terribly dangerous and exciting.
And then CBS spoiled it all by showing the video of her getting off the plane. I expected her to come running off the plane in a brown leather jacket and fedora, bullwhip at her side, pistol in hand in case she had to deal with a scimitar-waving terrorist. Instead, she and Chelsea walked sedately down the stairway and shook hands with dignitaries. I was expecting Hillariana Jones and the Last Crusade and all I got was a re-run of The Queen. Most disappointing.
I guess in this case, the fact that she was the First Lady at the time made it more difficult for her to pad her resume and get away with it, since foreign trips by the President's wife are newsworthy enough that the media actually cover them. If she had just been a garden-variety senator at the time, the networks probably wouldn't have had cameras on her to blow holes in her story. Much like the Girls Gone Wild people saying, "What do we have in the archives for this Eliot Spitzer hooker Ashley Dupre?" the networks were able to say, "What do we have in the archives for this First Lady Bosnia trip?" And in both cases, they struck gold.
With the growing ubiquity of video cameras and sites like YouTube, etc., it's going to become ever more difficult for politicians to lie and get away with it. I think that's a good thing for America, even if it's not so good for politicians.
