Saturday, March 08, 2008

Irish Laugh at Hillary

They're not laughing with you, they're laughing at you

Another lie bites the dust.
Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.

"I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around," he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely "the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets" during elections. "She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player."

Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am.

"I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland," she told CNN on Wednesday. But negotiators from the parties that helped broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told The Daily Telegraph that her role was peripheral and that she played no part in the gruelling political talks over the years.

Lord Trimble shared the Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume, leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, in 1998. Conall McDevitt, an SDLP negotiator and aide to Mr Hume during the talks, said: "There would have been no contact with her either in person or on the phone. I was with Hume regularly during calls in the months leading up to the Good Friday Agreement when he was taking calls from the White House and they were invariably coming from the president."

Central to Mrs Clinton’s claim of an important Northern Ireland role is a meeting she attended in Belfast in with a group of women from cross-community groups. "I actually went to Northern Ireland more than my husband did," she said in Nashua, New Hampshire on January 6th.

"I remember a meeting that I pulled together in Belfast, in the town hall there, bringing together for the first time Catholics and Protestants from both traditions, having them sitting a room where they had never been before with each other because they don’t go to school together, they don’t live together and it was only in large measure because I really asked them to come that they were there.

"And I wasn’t sure it was going to be very successful and finally a Catholic woman on one side of the table said, ’You know, every time my husband leaves for work in the morning I worry he won’t come home at night.

"And then a Protestant woman on the other side said, ’Every time my son tries to go out at night I worry he won’t come home again’. And suddenly instead of seeing each other as caricatures and stereotypes they saw each other as human beings and the slow, hard work of peace-making could move forward."

There is no record of a meeting at Belfast City Hall, though Mrs Clinton attended a ceremony there when her husband turned on the Christmas tree lights in November 1995. The former First Lady appears to be referring a 50-minute event the same day, arranged by the US Consulate, the same day at the Lamp Lighter CafĂ© on the city’s Ormeau Road.
Shocking that this pathological liar would embellish her story, isn't it?

More from Gateway Pundit.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton's husband has more explaining to do. Not that he'll ever bother.
Another day, another reason for Democratic primary voters to demand complete financial transparency from Bill and Hillary Clinton.

And, it seems, another reason for the Clintons to shudder at the prospect.

The Chicago Tribune reports that in 2004, the ex-president spoke at the Manhattan launching party of a new Web-search company partly backed by the Chinese government - in exchange for a donation of 200,000 shares of the Google-wannabe to his charitable foundation.

Two years later, with the company still in the red, he somehow managed to unload the stock for $3.50 per share - well over the mere cents it was judged to be worth - for $700,000 in total profit.

And that number is well above the $150,000 that Clinton typically commands for Manhattan speeches.

Nevertheless, he refuses to say who bught the stock - or why
.

One wonders: Why is Bill Clinton so often involved in shady-looking deals?
Update: Instapundit links. Thanks!


Ed Morrissey
has a few chuckles. Further reaction here and here.

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