I Can Remember It For You Wholesale

[billroper]

Hillary Clinton is nowhere near the top of my list of favorite people. On the other hand, I think that she may be catching flak for the wrong thing on this whole Bosnia story -- although it's possible that the actual story might be more damaging than having people think she just lied about it!

For those of you who missed it, apparently Hillary spoke in several speeches about how she had flown into Bosnia during wartime and had to run across the runway with Chelsea to avoid sniper fire. The only problem is that there's actually footage from the occasion where she's standing on the runway, accepting flowers from a local schoolgirl. Oops.

Except I somehow don't think she was lying. I think she actually misremembered.

I know that I've occasionally had a very realistic dream where I will be thinking about things a couple of days later and have a false memory drift up that's based on the dream. And I go, "Wait a minute. That never happened." I perform the appropriate edits, flag the false memory as entertaining, but false, and proceed with my life.

So imagine that you're going to be flying into a war zone with your daughter and you have one whopper of a nightmare. Now it's many years later, you're probably sleep-deprived from being on the campaign trail and not at your best anyway, and you remember the nightmare, not what actually happened, because the nightmare was vivid enough to stick with you and you did a lousy editing job on your own memory.

I find this plausible based on my own experience.

But, oh! How absolutely lousy it would sound to try to explain it! And imagine the resulting attack ads. "Hillary Clinton can't tell the difference between the real world and her own nightmares."

Maybe it's better that everyone think she's a liar. :)

Comments

[ericcoleman]

I could almost buy that if she hadn't told the story several times, not just once late at night as she claims ... which also has something to say about her credibility

[billroper]

Well, once you've dredged the false memory up, you're going to keep repeating it until it's rubbed in your face that you're remembering something that didn't happen.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

Except that she wrote about this in her memoirs and gave the right story.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Well, what about it? I often can't tell the difference between the real world and my own nightmares...

[pheltzer.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's better that everyone think she's a liar. :)

Isn't that the standard definition for a politician anyway?

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

What really disturbs me is that I think you're right in the analysis that it would be less of a political liability to be perceived as having told a complete whopper and been caught than it would be to have had the kind of human failure that most of us have experienced but which bother us so much we don't want to think about it.

Then Bill made it worse

[hvideo.livejournal.com]

A few days ago Bill Clinton tried to excuse it by saying that it was just once (it was three times) late at night (each of the three times was during the day)... and of course this was not too long after the Hillary ads about "Who do you want to answer that 3 AM phone call?" If Bill wants to use "late at night" as an excuse for poor performance, that really undermines that ad....

[mbcrui.livejournal.com]

I think a lot is being made of it because the news has to have something to report every fricking night. I swear we never saw this much of the candidates before 1996... did we? And imagine taking your child into a war zone-- that would be just the kind of nightmare you'd have.