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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review March 31, 2008 / 24 Adar II 5768

Hillary's soccer fantasy

By Dick Morris & Eileen Mc Gann


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Hillary Clinton's made-from-whole-cloth fantasy about the perils of her trip to Bosnia was no unique foray into a world of make-believe accomplishments.


She's been doing that for a long time.


Here's another telling example: At a 1997 race-relations forum for teenagers in Boston, Hillary recalled the "pain" of a "childhood encounter" that helped her to grasp the injury suffered by the victims of bigotry. Her comments came as her husband was launching his second term in office by calling for a national dialogue on race and reconciliation. In an effort to empathize with her audience and inject herself into the discussion, she made up yet another incident that never happened.


"During a junior high school soccer game" on a cold day, Hillary claimed "a goalee told her 'I wish people like you would freeze.'" Stunned, the future first lady asked how she could feel that way when she did not even know her. "I don't have to know you," the goalee shot back, "to know I hate you."


Nice story, b ut it never happened.


While today's generation of young girls routinely play on multiple soccer teams in their schools and towns, Hillary's generation had no such opportunity. Hillary may have attended lots of Chelsea Clinton's soccer games, but, that seems to be the sum total of her soccer career. As a school sport, girls' soccer teams didn't exist when Hillary went to middle or high school. In 2004, the Athletic Director for South Main High School in Park Ridge — and a 34-year veteran of the school system — confirmed that there were no girls' soccer teams of any kind in Hillary's school district in the 1960s.


Hillary seems to have simply conjured up the tale, like the one about the Balkans and the one about Chelsea jogging around the Trade Center on 9/11 and the one about being named after Sir Edmund Hillary, to appear more relevant to her listeners and to establish a bond of empathy with them.


(Girls' soccer was catalyzed by the passage of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act in 1972 which mandated that girls and boys sports be treated equally in public education. It was only well after that law went into effect that girls' soccer teams sprung up. Unfortunately, Hillary was 25 at the time and well past her intramural days).


These "embellishments" of Hillary's biography are similar to those of Al Gore during his race in 2000. But her claims to foreign policy experience and domestic policy influence in the White House are far more important. Nobody ever questioned the experience of competence of the Vice President as he ran for the top job based on his decades of serving in federal office. But Hillary has had just seven rather uneventful years in the Senate (and she hasn't shown up for the last year while she was campaigning for president.) We have to take Hillary's word about what role she played in the Administration's policy formulation. And her word has been increasingly disputed.


Just this week, former Democratic Congressman William Lacy Clay, one of the original sponsors of the Family Leave Act, challenged her claim that she played a major role in passing the landmark bill. Hillary Clinton "never had anything to do with it," he said. Clay pointed out that the bill had been passed several times by the Democratic Congress before Bill and Hillary ever arrived in Washington, but was subsequently vetoed twice by former President Bush. It was a no-brainer that Clinton would sign the bill — as he did just 15 days after taking office. And, during that time, Hillary's official schedules never mention the words "Family Leave Act." Her tight calendar in those two weeks included lots of health care meetings, attending the funeral of Thurgood Marshall, joining the president at the National Prayer Breakfast (her schedules notes: no formal role for the First Lady), attending a week-end session at Camp David with her latest new age guru, and hosting a dinner dance for the National Governor's Association. But nothing about the Family Leave Act that she worked so hard to pass.


As we learn more and more about her propensity to make up stories and read herself into history — a modern Forrest Gump — we can be forgiven if we take her claims to have been central to everything from the economic recovery to the Irish peace process with a large grain of salt.


Why does she feel the need to enhance her relevance or dramatize her story with fantasies? When it comes to personal whoppers, like the soccer one, it's likely that it's because she's seen how effortlessly Bill relates to his audiences, conveying empathy by biting his lip or with a tear in his eye. Hillary knows that she can't do that. So she invents circumstances that compensate and put her in the midst of the action, at the center of events. She tries to create empathy, become close to the audience, through contrivance since she can't project it adequately without resorting to fiction. It's crazy, but relatively harmless.


But the stories about her fake co-president experiences are another issue entirely. Her tales of stopping the recession or speaking up for Rwanda (when no one — even the president &mdas h; knew about the genocide or had any meetings about the issue) or being "instrumental" in the Irish peace process are not reminisces of her days in the White House. They're the calculated fantasies of a person who changes her stories when the truth is too prosaic or not sufficiently politically relevant. That's Hillary Clinton.

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JWR contributor Dick Morris is author, most recently, of "Outrage: How Illegal Immigration, the United Nations, Congressional Ripoffs, Student Loan Overcharges, Tobacco Companies, Trade Protection, and Drug Companies Are Ripping Us Off . . . And". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.) Comment by clicking here.



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