There is a lot of buzz this week about Hillary Clinton’s admission that she “misspoke” when she made claims – apparently to buff her commander-in-chief credential – about “landing under sniper fire” and “running with our heads down” when she traveled to Bosnia in 1997. As it turns out, she was greeted by children reading poetry.Sure, that’s embarrassing.
But at least she has admitted to “a blip” of a “misstatement” on the Bosnia front.
There have been no such admissions with regard to her outright lies regarding trade policy.
Clinton has campaigned this year as a critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Despite the fact that the deal was promoted and passed during the Bill Clinton presidency, and despite her own long record of praising NAFTA’s “benefits,” Clinton has been claiming on the current campaign trail that, “I have been a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning.”
In truth, she was an advocate for NAFTA within the Bill Clinton White House. White House records released last week confirm that Hillary Clinton spoke on behalf of NAFTA and participated in strategy sessions organized to figure out how to gain congressional approval of an agreement that was opposed by labor, farm, environmental and human-rights groups.
Remarkably, the Clinton campaign continues to claim that Hillary Clinton was really a fifth columnist quietly promoting a fair-trade agenda within her husband’s militantly pro-free trade White House.”Senator Clinton was pushing back,” Clinton campaign spokesman Jay Carson claimed in a conference call with reporters last week.Even when she appeared at a November 10, 1993, session set up to tell business leaders how to lobby Congress, Carson says Clinton simply did a “drop by” – sort of a peak in the door and a wave.
The reality is that she was the headliner at that closed-door event.
And she was not “pushing back.”
The executive director of the United States Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel, Laura Jones, was at the meeting. She tells ABC News that it is “ludicrous” to suggest that Hillary Clinton was a half-hearted backer of the trade deal that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of unionized jobs, hobbled whole industries, saddled this country with record trade deficits, undermined protections for workers in the U.S. and abroad and forced Mexican farmers off the land and into the immigration stream.
“There was no question that everyone who spoke including the First Lady was for NAFTA, it was a rally on behalf of NAFTA to help it get passed,” says Jones. “It’s unquestionable.”
