Soccer Dad

Not that hillary

During this primary season, one of the things that candidates do is define themselves. No candidate is perfect and some are more flawed than others.

Among the Democrats, my favored candidate is Sen. Clinton. It's not because I support most of her policies, but because my foremost concern is the war on terror. For all of her faults, Sen. Clinton is the one Democrat who might take that struggle seriously.

Of course, among the many weaknesses Sen. Clinton has is her artificiality.

The recent death of Sir Edmond Hillary brings up an example of that. Edward Rothstein recently celebrated Sir Hillary's accomplishment and wrote:

In contemporary exploration near disasters and traumas are not an expected part of the project, the way breaking ice formations and dwindling oxygen are in Sir Edmund’s account. They are the failures, best passed over. The goal is for a safe routine, as if exploration could resemble the contemporary playground, with its rubber pads and redesigned play equipment, explicitly discouraging enterprising ventures and the testing of boundaries, eliminating all “monkey bars” and “seesaws.”

Of course that's not the point of this post. The point is that once upon a time Sen. Clinton claimed that she was named for Sir Edmond. Snopes investigated the claim and the controversy and concluded.

We still find this explanation rather incredible. In order to accept it, one has to believe that only after Hillary Clinton was nearly 60 years old, and only after she had been pilloried in the press for more than ten years for claiming she had been named after someone who was virtually unknown in the U.S. at the time of her birth, and only after her husband had unknowingly presented the fictitious story as true in his own autobiography, did her mother finally confess that the "sweet family story" she told her daughter wasn't the truth. (Hillary Clinton doesn't have the excuse that other people were spreading a falsehood about her, as she herself was the one who initiated the claim back in 1995.)

As we noted back in 2003, this story was likely a little white lie concocted for a special occasion back in 1995, and even if it really was a "sweet family story" Dorothy Rodham told her daughter Hillary many years ago, the latter has almost certainly known for quite a long time that it was just a story.

Using the name of the famous explorer didn't bother her. If it built her reputation, she wouldn't deny it. All politicians embellish, but there seems to be a different - slightly disturbing - aspect to her embellishments.

hillary clinton.