Hillary: Do Be A Do Bee

Hillary confides her girlish dreams, she is such a victim, you see, but so self-effacing to her audience. Her latest story is that she wanted to be......an Olympic contender!! But she wasn't good at it, so she wanted to be.....an astronaut!!! But they didn't take girls. So that's why she's a politician. NASA has a lot to answer for.

But this sounds kind of familiar to me. Didn't Hillary tell us some years ago that she wanted to be a Marine? How come that didn't make it into the speech? It would be especially apropos now as she is running for reelection in the Senate, given that she serves on the Senate Armed Services committee and voted to support the war in Iraq. Could it be because the story isn't true? Also debunked here on a moderate website.

And going a little further afield, didn't Hillary, when she was on an official visit to New Zealand, tell Kiwis she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary? (Dick Morris, May 2, 2004, scroll down, try not to be hexed by Maureen Dowd, until you see NY Post logo.)

Only problem was, she was born before he became famous in 1953, so it wasn't likely he was well known in Park Ridge, Illinois in 1947. Dick Morris:

Hillary has a disturbing tendency to concoct carefully revised "facts" about her past, her persona, her circumstances and her experiences - in other words, she has a real problem telling the truth. Sometimes her deceptions are silly. At other times, they are deeply pernicious. But even the fluffier fabrications send us a warning not to trust her.

Take an apparently innocuous example: her nutty claim that her mother named her after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest.

Meeting Sir Edmund by chance at the Katmandu airport, Hillary apparently made up the story on the spot, telling reporters she was named after the intrepid explorer. To bolster her claim, she piled on the details: While her mother was pregnant, Hillary extemporized, she had read an article about Sir Edmund and noticed that he spelled his name with two l's - "which," the first lady said, is how her mother "thought she was supposed to spell Hillary."

She continued: "So when I was born, she called me Hillary, and she always told me it's because of Sir Edmund Hillary."

But Sir Edmund didn't climb Everest until May 29, 1953 - 51/2 years after Hillary Rodham was born. In fact, until 1951 Sir Edmund Hillary hadn't even left New Zealand for his climb in the Himalayas. Before that, he was an unknown beekeeper.

Why would Hillary make up such a silly and unnecessary story? To give the press good copy? To try to glamorize her family history by connecting it with the heroic mountaineer?

Sometimes, though, Hillary's inventions have been more than simple Walter Mitty fantasizing - as when she invented a story about 9/11 on the "Today" show, implying to Katie Couric that her daughter, Chelsea, had narrowly missed being on the grounds of the Twin Towers at the time of the attacks.

Hillary told a national television audience that Chelsea had "gone on what she thought would be a great jog. She was going to go around the towers. She went to get a cup of coffee and - that's when the plane hit . . . She did hear it. She did."

Couric told NBC's viewers that Hillary, "at that moment, was not just a senator, but a concerned parent."

Chelsea herself, though, flatly contradicted her mother's account in an article for Talk magazine, which she apparently had not cleared with Hillary. As Chelsea revealed, she "was alone at a friend's Union Square apartment in Manhattan that morning" when her host phoned to tell her what had happened.

Instead of being anywhere near the World Trade Center, she was three miles northeast of Ground Zero - clear on the other side of town.

Hillary had lied. Effortlessly, spontaneously, chillingly, Hillary simply invented the tale. Why? Did she feel the need to bond more closely with her newly adopted state at the moment of its greatest catastrophe? Whatever it was, to lie in this way at that time suggests a serious character flaw.

When Al Gore claimed to be the father of the Internet, or that his marriage was the basis for "Love Story," his exaggerations tripped him up. Would a Hillary candidacy - or presidency - be constantly embroiled in similar controversy.

So what are we to make ofHillary's sweet little story?

One of her latest biographers, Edward Klein, had this to say in an interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez of NRO last summer:

Klein: Barring an act of God, Hillary will seek her party’s nomination in 2008 for the presidency.

NRO: If she runs, will she have a "woman problem" like she did when she ran for Senate?

Klein: She already has a woman problem. Many women don’t like Hillary. They don’t think she has earned her place in the sun.

Hillary will try to counter that problem two ways: First, by showing how hard she has worked as a senator, and second, by portraying herself as a victim of sexism.

Check.

But why does she feel she has to lie? I guess that's something she and Bill have in common. And Al.

Maybe they would all be happier as beekeepers. A little honey can sweeten any disposition. And it sorta looks like an astronaut outfit. Hillary can pretend.

Hey, how about this?