Ducking phantom sniper fire

Her story was true – it was only the facts that had been changed,” one wag wrote in an Internet blog discussion of Hillary Clinton’s recently disclosed fib about her allegedly hair-raising experience under sniper fire on a trip to Bosnia in 1996.

While delivering a speech on the war in Iraq last week in her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton told her audience, “I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia. I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

After that speech, the television networks gleefully played the “gotcha” game, digging out old film clips from the trip in question. And guess what, sports fans, the footage clearly showed a number of discrepancies in Clinton’s story – a tale, it turned out, she had told more than once on the campaign trail.

There was no sniper fire. No one had been forced to duck for cover. The greeting ceremony went off as planned. As Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, strolled across the tarmac, they appeared to be in no particular hurry to wind up the photo opportunity “to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

Oops.

As I watched the CBS coverage of the story, I wondered if perhaps Clinton had “misremembered” the incident, as New York Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens had so famously suggested to a Congressional committee had been the case with a teammate who told authorities about a conversation in which Clemens had admitted using illegal performance-enhancing substances.

But, no, when the news media confronted Clinton with the discrepancies between her story and the actual event, she breezily acknowledged that she had made a mistake. Then, like most politicians caught up Exaggeration Creek without a plausible defense, she changed the subject and suggested that now would be a swell time to move on to the real issues of the campaign.

The incident raised an obvious question concerning what, to me, has always been one of life’s mysteries: What provokes high-profile and supposedly intelligent people to pull such boneheaded stunts when they have so much to lose – especially in an age when technology can so easily be employed to expose the lies and embellishments?

After all, it wasn’t as though Clinton had arrived alone at the Bosnian airport and there was no one around who could shoot down her story. The tarmac was crawling with military personnel, Bosnian guests and a news media entourage toting cameras and tape recorders. Had she forgotten the damn cameras, tape recorders and the Google fact-checking capability of the Internet? Had she told the story so often, without inviting rebuttal, that she believed it herself? And where were the watchdogs in the media the first time she floated the bogus “sniper” tale in a campaign speech, anyway?

The episode was mindful of the speed bump that slowed down Al Gore’s run for the presidency a few years ago when he said he had “taken the initiative” in creating the Internet, and got hammered for seeming to embellish his accomplishments.

The affliction is not limited to high-powered Democrats. Richard Nixon was in a class by himself when it came to stretching the truth – was so good at it, in fact, that he was defrocked and sent packing into exile. There are some Republicans in and around the present administration in Washington who appear to have mastered the art, as well.

When I Googled the words “lying pathology” on my computer, I found that the difference between a garden-variety liar and a pathological liar is that the former knows he is lying, whereas the latter actually believes his own lies, as though he could change reality with his thoughts.

Pathological lying is believed to be a neurological thing, I was informed. Something to do with decreased activity in the liar’s thalamus, particularly the right hemithalamus. Other research has shown that pathological liars tend to have “an increased activity of the anterior cingulated dorsolateral prefontal cortex and thalamic nuclei.” Which is pretty much what I had suspected all along, although no one had ever stated it so clearly before.

No, wait. That’s not quite right. Except for the cingulated dorsolateral stuff, which I thoroughly get, I am telling a whopper when I claim to have even the remotest clue as to just what that alphabet-soup concoction in the name of medical science, above, is all about.

You’ve caught me red-handed. I made a mistake. Now I think it’s time that we move on.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may e-mail him at

olddawg@bangordailynews.net.