I Misspoke, But Wait... Isn't That a Scary Black Preacher Over There?!?!

Hillary Clinton has been taking some deserved lumps for misspeaking (aka, lying) about her national security cred the last couple of days. Rather than ducking sniper fire on the airport tarmac in Bosnia, video evidence suggests that she was welcomed instead by an 8-year-old bearing a poem (which can sometimes be just as dangerous). Here's Olbermann on the charade:



She says she only misspoke the one time, but AmericaBlog has found that she's been using this sniper-fire line for several months. And in explaining her misstatement, she noted this:

I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but there was this 8 year old girl and I can't rush by her, I have to at least greet her, so I took her stuff and then I left.

The First Lady took this 8-year-old's stuff and then ran for safety, leaving the girl helpless out on the tarmac?

So, with all the rather damning video evidence to the contrary floating about the YouTube-osphere, there's only one way for the Clinton campaignhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif to respond: remind everyone how the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is an awful, unpatriotic, angry black man who preached to Barrack Obama. The TPM omnibus has a couple of examples--one from a surrogate and another from Clinton herself in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

I'm sure we'll be dredging this back up again and again this week.

As an aside, I was listening to , where Steve Scher invites several local columnists to chat about the week that was, as well as take a few calls. One call came in from a United Church of Christ (UCC) pastor (the same denomination as Obama's church, as well as the church that I not-so-regularly attend of late), and he had a very interesting take on why Obama was "hanging around with this guy:"

What Obama is really doing is expressing what is the heart of who we are as the United Church of Christ. We're based on a covenantal policy, which means you hang in there with one another because you may possibly not have all the truth yet, that God is bigger than all of us. And I can illustrate that by saying that in Washington, most of the UCC church members belong to churches who are open and affirming to the gay and lesbian community, and we have ordained clergy and so forth. About 75 percent of our members belong to congregations which do that. In the rest of the country, it's about 12 percent. The difference is, the good news is, we don't split over that. We have sharp disagreements, but for about 40 years we've been getting along even though we disagree on a subject where people have very, very strong feelings. Obama's doing exactly the same thing. He belongs to a United Church of Christ (church) and he will stay in covenant with that pastor even though he sharply disagrees. It's a little like a marriage.