In the words of WarScribe

While checking the political news this morning and hoping beyond hope that someday somehow the Democratic Primaries would end, I found the following well crafted post in the comments section of this article:

Reply #3, Posted by WarScribe, Date: May. 21, 2008 - 12:32 AM EST

I generally turn off my BS meter when Hillary Clinton begins speaking about leading Barack Obama in the popular vote count. I’m afraid the gauges might fly right off the machine when she suggests that — if you add two states where the votes weren’t supposed to count and ignore four states which haven’t yet released their figures but where the votes did count and then, of course, conveniently forget the fact that in one of the states that she wants you to count, no one else was on the ballot — she is one-third of one percent ahead.

And so my meter was firmly set in the off position during Clinton’s Kentucky victory speech, where she very predictably made the same convoluted argument (which doesn’t seem to have had any sway with the two dozen superdelegates who have swung Obama’s way in the past two weeks.) Which I think is significant — because I still had to scratch my chin when she suggested “it’s often been said, ‘as Kentucky goes, so goes the nation.’ ”

Really? That’s often been said? Hillary made the comment at approximately 8:28 EST. At 8:30 EST — hoping to beat the dozens of transcripts and news reports of her speech online — I checked Google for the term “as Kentucky goes, so goes the nation.” So I checked — Google.

I got 16 hits. Including one that referred not the presidential nomination but to the Kentucky Derby. Another was a quote from Clinton herself, the day before the Kentucky primary. Sixteen hits on Google is the zeitgeistian equivalent to nothing. The term “hamburger pants” nets 552 hits. The randomly selected letters “sdfv” produce 22,200 hits (betcha didn’t know there was a Scuba Diving Federation of America.) And the term “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation” nets 9,530 hits. That latter fact I find particularly interesting, because Ohio has correctly picked the president every year since 1964 — the exact same record as neighboring Kentucky.

So the spirit of what Clinton said was, in fact, true. Which makes me wonder, why couldn’t she simply say that? Why not say, “Kentucky — you’ve picked the correct president every four years since I was in grade school! Thank you for voting so overwhelmingly for me tonight!”? Why make up a lie — even a little white one — about something that people often say when, very clearly, they don’t often say it?

Which brings me back to Clinton’s stories about landing under sniper fire in Bosnia, (which also clearly wasn’t true — not even remotely so,) and helping to secure peace in Ireland, (which was nearly as big of a lie, but didn’t get quite as much play, because it’s harder to make a funny YouTube video about Clinton pretending to have played a role in Ireland.) In all of these cases, the simple truth would have sufficed. It might even have been impressive. But something made her fib, if only just a bit. But politicians lie, right? That’s just what they do, isn’t it? Yes and no.

The reality of the nation we live in makes spin a political imperative — so much so that the media now routinely plays “gotcha” with politicians who fail to spin. But the finest of spin artists craft their messages so that they are NOT lying. That’s why Clinton’s message about getting more votes than Obama — while intellectually dishonest and, quite frankly, complete and total BS — is so politically compelling. Because Obama can’t say it’s not true. Instead he has to craft a message that is equally confounding to explain why it’s not true. The fact that Clinton lies when she clearly does not need to do so represents a fundamental misconception about the world we live in — the world she purportedly is “prepared from day one” to lead.

By 12 a.m. EST, Google was registering 179 hits for “as Kentucky goes, so goes the nation.” As I suspected, most were simply transcripts or reports from Clinton’s speech. But a number were Netizens identifying the “it’s often been said” part of Clinton’s speech for what it was — a little extra BS slapped on top of a campaign that has spent no small amount of time digging out of BS.

I think this nicely captures the source of so much mistrust and frustration with the Clintons.