Today Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson allowed that Hillary "misspoke" when she claimed to have landed at Tuzla in 1996 and, due to the threat of snipers, run across the tarmac with her head down. I agree with the consensus that she deserves a demerit for this. But I'm less bothered by it having read the account in her memoir, which seems to tell the story quite honestly (emphasis added):
Security conditions were constantly changing in the former Yugoslavia, and they had recently deteriorated again. Due to reports of snipers in the hills around the airstrip, we were forced to cut short an event on the tarmac with local children, though we did have time to meet them and their teachers and to learn how hard they had worked dyring the war to continue classes in any safe spot they could find. One eight year old girl gave me a copy of a poem she had written entitled "Peace".... We were then hustled off to the fortified American base at Tuzla....
Is it possible Hillary told a flat lie knowing that anyone who bothered to check her (indexed) book could immediately find the contradiction. Yes. Is it likely? I'm not so sure.
Regardless, this episode doesn't tell us all that much. Far more interesting would be a debate about the Clinton administration's slowness to act in the Balkans, the veracity of Hillary's claim that she wanted to intervene far earlier than her husband actually did, and whether Obama would have done anything differently. But in the debate about Hillary's misstatement or lie or whatever you want to call it, once again this campaign has become a somewhat cannibalistic argument about itself.
--Michael Crowley