A Hillary Update

Senator Hillary Clinton yesterday renewed her call for admission of the Michigan and Florida primary ballots.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday strengthened her pitch to allow disputed Democratic primaries in Michigan and Florida to be counted in the nominating contest, noting the vote totals had been officially recognized in each state.

"Some say their votes should be ignored and the popular vote in Michigan and Florida should be discounted. Well, I have a different view," Mrs. Clinton said at a rally.

Understandable, as the viability of her campaign is in danger without them.

Mrs. Clinton's latest comments came a day after Michigan Democrats announced there would be no do-over of that state's Jan. 15 primary, vastly dimming Mrs. Clinton's chances of catching Mr. Obama in the popular vote and in pledged delegates. Democrats in Florida had already announced there would be no revote there.

Simultaneously, Senator Clinton has been forced to drop another truth-challenged story she had been telling on the campaign trail.

For the past month, the New York senator liked to tell the tale of a pregnant woman who was denied health care from an Ohio hospital because she did not have $100 the hospital demanded to treat her. After being turned away, the woman was brought back to the hospital days later with severe complications. She had to be rushed to another facility for advanced treatment, but it was too late. Both the woman and the baby died, Clinton told her audiences.

For Clinton, the story was an example of how everyone should have universal healthcare. It is a powerful tale and always drew gasps from the audience.

The hospital, which was never named in Clinton's speeches, objected this weekend, saying it wasn't true and demanded that Clinton stop telling it. The O'Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, Ohio, told the New York Times that the woman was insured and was never denied treatment.

The Clinton campaign told ABC News today that the candidate heard the story from a deputy sheriff and had no reason to doubt the story. "If the hospital claims it didn't happen that way, we certainly respect that and she won't repeat the story," said Clinton spokeswoman Mo Elleithee.

If the phony story "was an example of how everyone should have universal healthcare", its expose is a reminder of one of the positives (and some would say, one of the weaknesses) of the American health care system: no one is turned away at the Emergency Room.

Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens examines the depth of the mendacity of her other tall campaign tale, that of landing under fire in Bosnia as First Lady.

The punishment visited on Sen. Hillary Clinton for her flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia should be much heavier than it has yet been and should be exacted for much more than just the lying itself. There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally lying claim of having "misspoken.") The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor.

* * * * *

Yet Sen. Clinton, given repeated chances to modify her absurd claim to have operated under fire while in the company of her then-16-year-old daughter and a USO entertainment troupe, kept up a stone-faced and self-loving insistence that, yes, she had exposed herself to sniper fire in the cause of gaining moral credit and, perhaps to be banked for the future, national-security "experience." This must mean either a) that she lies without conscience or reflection; or b) that she is subject to fantasies of an illusory past; or c) both of the above. Any of the foregoing would constitute a disqualification for the presidency of the United States.