Hillary Clinton reinvents the past – again

If you were a politician widely ridiculed for some outrageous examples of “misspeaking” or – as it’s called in the real world – lying, wouldn’t you try to stick to the truth in future? Not U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She’s been at it again. Visiting Northern Ireland last week, she gave a speech at Stormont to a packed Assembly.

“Leaders like all of you are elected to offer a choice between allegiance to a past that cannot be changed, and commitment to a different future that you shape.”

A past that cannot be changed? Not if you’re Hillary Clinton. For she continued:

“When Bill and I first came to Belfast, we stayed at the Europa Hotel, as I have again this time, even though then there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs.”

What a vision she conjured up. But that’s all it is. A vision. It never happened. The Clintons were there in November 1995. The last bomb at the much-bombed Europa exploded two years earlier and the renovations were finished by January 1993, a full 22 months before the Clintons arrived with their 110-room booking.

Martin Mulholland, the hotel concierge at the time, told The Belfast Telegraph:

“The hotel was spotless. There had been no bombs and there was no scaffolds or wooden boards or anything like that when they came. “The place was spotless. The only security or boards that went up were the ones put up by Bill Clinton’s secret service team.”

So, once again, Hillary Clinton tries rewriting the past, even though she knows she will be found out. And to think that people wonder about Gordon Brown’s mental health.