Barack Obama misrepresented gun numbers during his trip to Mexico last week in a way that amounts to lying. Appearing with Mexican President Felipe Calderón on Thursday, Obama spoke about the drug violence in Mexico:

“This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States. More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border.”

Here’s the truth. When the Mexican government confiscates guns, it sorts out those that appear to be made in the United States and sends them to us so we can trace them by serial number. But the guns that they send to us are only a fraction of the total number of guns that they confiscate.

Of the subset of guns sent by the Mexican government to the US, 90% turn out to actually be from the US, and the rest were mistakenly identified. That’s where the 90% figure comes from. But the guns that are actually from the US used in the Mexican gun war are really only about 17% of the total number of guns confiscated by Mexico.

Nevertheless, Obama is using these misleading assertions to promote the Inter-American Arms Treaty, first unsuccessfully proposed in 1998 and now being revived in the new effort to disarm America. The Washington Times notes Obama’s real agenda:

Democrats aren’t alone in repeating phony gun statistics. The New York Times, CNN and numerous networks continue to repeat the 90 percent figure with no reporting to back it up. The hysteria is used to create the notion that a major problem exists with American guns – and Mr. Obama is anxious to step in to solve that problem with a $400 million program to stop U.S. guns from going to Mexico. That initiative would include clampdowns on U.S. gun shops.

It is ridiculous for Mr. Obama to blame Mexico’s lawlessness on Americans as if the longstanding corruption of Mexican elected officials, judges and law-enforcement officers has nothing to do with it. …his real agenda is to pursue gun control here at home.

The prospects for another Clinton presidency dim moment to moment. Hope hardly flickers.

Hillary has lost a 10 point lead in Pennsylvania according to recent polls. She is running neck and neck with Obama in that state. They say if she loses that primary, it’s over. (But, Bill said if she lost Texas, it was over. She did, and it ain’t over.)

No matter what, she vows to slug it out all the way to the convention.

Her lead in super delegates is being cut daily. Still, she insists on continuing, because she’s “no quitter.”

A growing number of Dem leaders endorse Obama and call for her to step down for the sake of the Party.

Always the Party Pooper, she doggedly perseveres, praying Obama will twist an ankle or gaffe out.

Polls show her negatives are increasing: people don’t trust her.

So, she clings to Rocky Balboa and calls on the President to boycott the Olympics. Desperation conjures up every flying monkey available.

As her numbers decline, the tall tales increase, and the attacks on Obama intensify.

Twelve years ago, she was dodging bullets in Bosnia, she says. Confronted by contradictory evidence, she claims she “misspoke.” Source.

It is revealed she told Bill Richardson Obama cannot possibly beat McCain. Next day, she seems to deny it with so many words no one is sure it’s a denial, and then the day after, she claims she “misheard” the reporter’s question. Source.

She recounts a story about a woman who died in Ohio because a hospital refused to provide care claiming the woman had no insurance. The hospital denies the story and provides proof it is a hoax, asking Hillary to stop telling the tall tale. The Clinton campaign releases a statement saying they “respect” the hospital officials’ version of events. Source.

It’s all so familiar. The double-talk. The manipulation. The lies, the misrepresentations, the controversy, the scandal.

“Shame on you Barack Obama!” Source.

She accuses him of plagiarism. Source.

Hillary accuses him of saying he was a professor when he wasn’t, and the law school contradicts her and backs him. Source.

She accuses Obama of taking money from oil companies, while she takes it from anyone, including convicted felons and foreign interests. Source.

She attempts to hang her opponent with a guilt by association reference citing the ongoing Rezko trial in Chicago. Source #1 and source #2.

It may be Obama will suffer for his Rezko association, but many Democrats wince seeing Hillary use dirty tricks against a fellow Democrat.

Seeking to profit from Obama’s pastor’s remarks, she proclaims she would not have attended a church like that. Rev. Wright “would not have been my pastor,” she says. Source.

No one should be surprised she lies, hits below the belt, refuses to quit, and cuts a few crocodile tears along the way.

The Clinton campaign is not about working Americans. It is not about the middle class. It is not about people without health insurance. Her campaign is not about ending the war or bailing out people facing foreclosure. It is not about what is good for the country, or the Democrat Party.

It’s about Hillary.

It has always been about Hillary.

She is addicted to the limelight, addicted to the acquisition of power, and the wielding of power.

From her earliest years it would appear her self-worth has continuously been measured by her performance. Without political success, she feels she has no self-worth. Politics is her religion, and her only salvation is through good works.

About 17 months back, Dick Morris said a Hillary presidency would be disastrous, not only because of her socialist policies, her hatred for all things military, and her lack of executive experience. Morris, who worked for the Clintons for years helping Bill get elected, also asserts Hillary is unstable emotionally.

Morris insists Hillary is actually two people. There is the public Hillary, caustic enough as it is, and there is the private Hillary, a woman given to ravings, not bashful about throwing things and breaking the furniture. Morris describes her as someone who “cares deeply about being loved,” she tends to read from a playbook rather than think creatively, and she demonstrates a “cultish adoration of guys with all the answers.”

If it is legitimate to draw conclusions about Obama given his association with Rev. Wright, it is likewise legitimate to inquire of Clinton’s motives and methods given her mentor, Saul Alinsky.

Alinsky was a Marxist, and brilliant tactician. His approach was essentially two-pronged: get power by any means, and wield it to crush those considered wealthy, privileged, powerful, war-mongering, oppressive, imperialistic, blah, blah.

His is a system drained of morality, an “ethic” of the jungle, where winning is everything and “one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.” (Yikes. In other words, Saul determines what is best for the rest of us, and if that somehow tweeked his conscience, the hell with his conscience! Hillary operates in a similar way it would appear.)

Alinsky wrote two books: Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971). He was the high prophet of the science of revolution. Among his rules: (Hillary has learned and applied them well):

• “My aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and how to use it.”
• “Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority.”
• “The third rule of the ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.”
• Give a moral appearance (as opposed to behaving morally): “All effective action requires the passport of morality.”
• “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this. They can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”
• “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
• “In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.”
• “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
• “The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”

With Hillary and others, we are dealing with seriously disturbed disciples of Alinsky, a man who once wrote:

“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history, the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.”

Saul passed the torch to Hillary in 1972. Since then she has clawed her way to her current position by any means available: riding Bill’s coat tails through serial infidelities, employing ridicule of the opposition, using polarization, goading and demonizing the opposition, organizing power grabs, appearing moral and middle class, aiming below the belt.

Anyone interested in the dark side of the woman can grab an arm load of books on the subject from any library. Her critics are many, her flaws grievous, her political philosophy bone chilling.

You may not embrace the idea of an Obama presidency, but at least we can thank him for sparing us another Clinton presidency.

The most damaging dimension of a Hillary presidency would be this: at a time when we need to come together like never before, Hillary will tear us apart.

It’s not about America.

It’s not about the poor.

It’s not about the common good, or the general welfare.

It’s all about Hillary.

And it appears she is her own worst enemy.

All three of the presidential front-runners are, in my opinion, dismal choices. In a large and diverse nation so full of talented statesmen, it should be possible to do better. But one of the three stands out as much more dishonest than the two others. And two widely read Blogosphere columnists are devoted to documenting her “mis-speaks.” I was inspired to write this article by John Stephenson, who published the other bookend for this piece.

Dick Morris has compiled a list of Hillary Clinton’s lies:

Admitted Lies

• Chelsea was jogging around the Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. (She was in bed watching it on TV.)
• Hillary was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. (She admitted she was wrong. He climbed Mt. Everest five years after her birth.)
• She was under sniper fire in Bosnia. (A girl presented her with flowers at the foot of the ramp.)
• She learned in The Wall Street Journal how to make a killing in the futures market. (It didn’t cover the market back then.)

Whoppers She Won’t Confess To

• She didn’t know about the FALN pardons.
• She didn’t know that her brothers were being paid to get pardons that Clinton granted.
• Taking the White House gifts was a clerical error.
• She didn’t know that her staff would fire the travel office staff after she told them to do so.
• She didn’t know that the Peter Paul fundraiser in Hollywood in 2000 cost $700,000 more than she reported it had.
• She opposed NAFTA at the time.
• She was instrumental in the Irish peace process.
• She urged Bill to intervene in Rwanda.
• She played a role in the ’90s economic recovery.
• The billing records showed up on their own.
• She thought Bill was innocent when the Monica scandal broke.
• She was always a Yankees fan.
• She had nothing to do with the New Square Hasidic pardons (after they voted for her 1,400-12 and she attended a meeting at the White House about the pardons).
• She negotiated for the release of refugees in Macedonia (who were released the day before she got there).

Christopher Hitchens has elaborated on just one great big Hillary Clinton lie:

There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally lying claim of having “misspoken.”) The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor….

….many Bosnians were enthused by Bill Clinton’s pledge, during that ghastly summer [1992], to … come to the defense of the victims of ethnic cleansing….

….Note the date of Sen. Clinton’s visit to Tuzla. She went there in March 1996. By that time, the critical and tragic phase of the Bosnia war was effectively over, as was the greater part of her husband’s first term. What had happened in the interim? In particular, what had happened to the 1992 promise, four years earlier, that genocide in Bosnia would be opposed by a Clinton administration?

In the event, President Bill Clinton had not found it convenient to keep this promise….

Hitchens goes on to explain that Hillary persuaded Bill to stay out of Bosnia so as not to distract attention from her health care initiative. He quotes from For Love of Politics, a book written about the Clintons by Sally Bedell Smith:

Taking the advice of Al Gore and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a proposal to bomb Serbian military positions while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to defend themselves—the fulfillment of a pledge he had made during the 1992 campaign. But instead of pushing European leaders, he directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher merely to consult with them. When they balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated, creating a “perception of drift.” The key factor in Bill’s policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have “deep misgivings” and viewed the situation as “a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform.” The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people.

To these definitive accounts, I’ll add one more from an earlier ADMC article:

There’s the story about her experience with prejudice:

Another story from the book [Living History by Hillary Clinton] talks about how Hillary is at a race-relations conference in Boston with some teenagers, and she claims that she was on the soccer team, and a player from the opposing team told her that she hated her kind, and Hillary said — “You don’t even know me,” to which the girl replied — “I don’t have to know you to know I hate you.” An attempt to try to make the kids believe she knew exactly where they were coming from, and from personal experience at that! Too bad this is almost surely a lie, since there were no girl’s soccer teams at her high school in the 1960’s when this supposed event took place.

And, of course, there’s Whitewater and Vince Foster.

Neither of these columnists has any kind thoughts for Hillary. Referring to the possibility of Hillary as president, Dick Morris said:

“I’m leaving the country if this happens.”

Hitchens was even more acidic:

It’s hardly necessary for me to point out that the United States did not receive national health care in return for its acquiescence in the murder of tens of thousands of European civilians. But perhaps that is the least of it. Were I to be asked if Sen. Clinton has ever lost any sleep over those heaps of casualties, I have the distinct feeling that I could guess the answer. She has no tears for anyone but herself. In the end, and over her strenuous objections, the United States and its allies did rescue our honor and did put an end to Slobodan Milosevic and his state-supported terrorism. Yet instead of preserving a polite reticence about this, or at least an appropriate reserve, Sen. Clinton now has the obscene urge to claim the raped and slaughtered people of Bosnia as if their misery and death were somehow to be credited to her account! Words begin to fail one at this point. Is there no such thing as shame? Is there no decency at last? Let the memory of the truth, and the exposure of the lie, at least make us resolve that no Clinton ever sees the inside of the White House again.

Hillary Rodham was fired from her congressional job for unethical behavior when she was a 27 year old lawyer.

[Cross-posted from Stop the ACLU Blog]

Is this curtains for Hillary’s political future? We’ve all kinda built a callous up on the uncountable lies she’s been caught in. Jerry Zeifman, the man who served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, may just be adding the garnish to her plate. How about a little unethical behavior for a cherry on top?

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

Wow! That’s some harsh fightin’ words. Will they stick? I mean, it isn’t news that she is a liar. Well, what exactly was it she did? Say goodbye to any true-hearted sincere liberal support. You say you wanna change the Constitution, well ya know….

How about trying to deny the right to counsel for Nixon?

After hiring Hillary, Doar assigned her to confer with me regarding rules of procedure for the impeachment inquiry. At my first meeting with her I told her that Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, House Speaker Carl Albert, Majority Leader “Tip” O’Neill, Parliamentarian Lou Deschler and I had previously all agreed that we should rely only on the then existing House Rules, and not advocate any changes. I also quoted Tip O’Neill’s statement that: “To try to change the rules now would be politically divisive. It would be like trying to change the traditional rules of baseball before a World Series.”

Hillary assured me that she had not drafted, and would not advocate, any such rules changes. However, as documented in my personal diary, I soon learned that she had lied. She had already drafted changes, and continued to advocate them. In one written legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon representation by counsel. In so doing she simply ignored the fact that in the committee’s then most recent prior impeachment proceeding, the committee had afforded the right to counsel to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

I had also informed Hillary that the Douglas impeachment files were available for public inspection in the committee offices. She later removed the Douglas files without my permission and carried them to the offices of the impeachment inquiry staff — where they were no longer accessible to the public.

Hillary had also made other ethical flawed procedural recommendations, arguing that the Judiciary Committee should: not hold any hearings with – or take depositions of — any live witnesses; not conduct any original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax evasion, or any other possible impeachable offense of President Nixon; and should rely solely on documentary evidence compiled by other committees and by the Justice Department’s special Watergate prosecutor.

Yikes! This is a big deal, and hopefully the media will not ignore it. If this gets legs, Hillary is done, in my opinion. It’s pretty damning stuff and it will be fun to watch her spin on it.

Ed Morrissey notes:

The right to counsel is considered one of the inviolable tenets of our justice system. It doesn’t speak well of ambitious attorneys working on a highly-charged political investigation that she wanted to deny someone the right to an attorney. Small wonder Zeifman questioned her ethics.

If all she did was to propose that as a tactic, that would not make it terribly concerning — but she did much more than just spitball ideas. When informed that public evidence showed a precedent for the right to counsel, she absconded with the files to eliminate the evidence. Does that remind anyone of later incidents in the Clinton narrative, such as the billing records for the Rose Law offices and the 900+ raw FBI files on political opponents of the Clintons?

Also see Rhymes With Right.

---

Addendum by ADMC editor from an archival forum at Free Republic:

Previously published in the NEW YORK POST
August 16. 1999

HILLARY’S WATERGATE SCANDAL
By Jerry Zeifman

IN December 1974, as general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, I made a personal evaluation of Hillary Rodham (now Mrs. Clinton), a member of the staff we had gathered for our impeachment inquiry on President Richard Nixon. I decided that I could not recommend her for any future position of public or private trust.

Why? Hillary’s main duty on our staff has been described by as “establishing the legal procedures to be followed in the course of the inquiry and impeachment.” A number of the procedures she recommended were ethically flawed. And I also concluded that she had violated House and committee rules by disclosing confidential information to unauthorized persons….

Tail wag: Rhymes With Right

Bill and Hillary Clinton create their own version of reality with the ease of accomplished storytellers.

In 1995, Hillary Clinton was touring Asia as first lady. She ran into Sir Edmund Hillary quite by chance at the Katmandu Airport. Sensing a photo op, she shook his hand and told him that her mother said she was named after him, adding:

“So when I was born, she called me Hillary and she always told me, ‘It’s because of Sir Edmund Hillary. It had two l’s, which is how she thought she was supposed to spell Hillary.’”

Bill Clinton repeated the story in his 2004 autobiography.

The problem: Hillary Clinton was born in 1947 and Sir Edmund Hillary gained fame for climbing Mount Everest in 1953.

Snopes generously forgives:

“….this story was likely a little white lie concocted for a special occasion back in 1995….”

The New York Times kindly explains:

For more than a decade, one piece of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s informal biography has been that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest….

But yesterday, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign said she was not named for Sir Edmund after all.

“It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add,” said Jennifer Hanley, a spokeswoman for the campaign.

And that, dear readers, is how the media transformed a bald-faced lie into a sweet family story.

——————–

Then there is the World Trade Center story:

After 9-11, Hillary had a problem. New Yorkers were desperately focused on their own needs for protection and they were saddled with a Senator who was not one of them — an Arkansan or was it a Chicagoan?

Interviewed on the Today Show one week after 9-11, she spun an elaborate yarn. The kindest thing we could say was that it was a fantasy. Or a fabrication.

She said that Chelsea was jogging around the World Trade Center on 9-11 and happened to duck into a coffee shop when the airplanes hit. She said that this move saved Chelsea’s life. But Chelsea told Talk Magazine that she was in a friend’s apartment four miles from ground zero when the first plane hit. Her friend called her, waking her up, and told her to turn on the TV. On television, she saw the second plane hit, disproving Hillary’s claim that “she heard the plane hit. She heard it. She did.”

So why did Hillary make up the story about Chelsea? Most likely to was because her co-Senator (and implicit rival for the voter’s affection), a real New Yorker Chuck Schumer spoke of his daughter, who attended Stuyvesant High School (Dick’s alma mater) located next to the Trade Center, being at real risk on 9-11. Hillary needed to make herself part of the scene.

She invented the entire story on national television, the Today Show, and didn’t blink an eye.

——————–

There’s the story about her experience with prejudice:

Another story from the book [Living History by Hillary Clinton] talks about how Hillary is at a race-relations conference in Boston with some teenagers, and she claims that she was on the soccer team, and a player from the opposing team told her that she hated her kind, and Hillary said — “You don’t even know me,” to which the girl replied — “I don’t have to know you to know I hate you.” An attempt to try to make the kids believe she knew exactly where they were coming from, and from personal experience at that! Too bad this is almost surely a lie, since there were no girl’s soccer teams at her high school in the 1960′s when this supposed event took place.

——————–

And now there’s the current Bosnia flap:

Sniper Fire, and Holes In Clinton’s Recollection

Hillary Clinton has been regaling supporters on the campaign trail with hair-raising tales of a trip she made to Bosnia in March 1996. In her retelling, she was sent to places that her husband, President Bill Clinton, could not go because they were “too dangerous.” When her account was challenged by one of her traveling companions, the comedian Sinbad, she upped the ante and injected even more drama into the story. In a speech earlier this week, she talked about “landing under sniper fire” and running for safety with “our heads down.”

There are numerous problems with Clinton’s version of events….

Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An 8-year-old Muslim girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English….

[Update 11:25PM. Writing on Anderson Cooper's 360^o blog, Carl Bernstein writes:

The indisputable elements of her Bosnian adventure affirm (again) the reluctant conclusion I reached in the final chapter of A Woman In Charge, my biography of her published last June: “Since her Arkansas years ... Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with the truth…"

]

——————–

Bill Clinton, to the public, to the grand jury:

“I did not have sex with that woman…….Ms. Lewinsky.”