More, Um, Exaggerations By Senator Clinton

If it seems like I'm piling on Hillary's campaign, it's because there's so much material to work with. On September 18, 2001, Senator Clinton spoke about former First Daughter and now high-priced management consultant Chelsea Clinton's involvement with the horrific events of the previous week. On the Today show, she said that Chelsea had been jogging around the World Trade Center that morning, and had just ducked into a coffee shop when the planes hit, which fortuitously saved her life. Senator Clinton spoke movingly of her daughter's proximity to disaster: "...she heard the plane hit. She heard it. She did."

Not true. Pretty much not true at all Chelsea Clinton said herself that she was in an apartment four miles away from Ground Zero and a friend called her to wake her up after the first strike. (I presume she was uptown rather than somewhere more proletarian like, say, Newark or Staten Island.) You'll recall that there was something like ten to fifteen minutes time between the first strike and the second. She woke up at about the same time I did that morning, after the first strike and watching the second one live on TV.

An aside: I woke up in between the first and second strikes because I lived in Los Angeles at the time. It was about 6:30 in the morning and I wasn't aiming at getting into the office until about 9:00. But it would have been 9:30 in the morning in New York City. What kind of management consultant is sleeping in a friend's apartment at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning? (Maybe she was in between gigs at the time.)

But to return to the main point -- Senator Clinton told us a whopper. No one batted an eye or did any fact-checking on it until now. How many of these are out there? At this point, if Senator Clinton were to tell me that the sky was blue on a clear day, a part of me would want to go outside and check.