Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Hillary's "Millions of words a day"

CNN's website says that in explaining the difference between her description of running from a plane in Bosnia under fire in 1996 and the video of her walking normally from that plane:

Clinton told the paper's editorial board it was a "minor blip." Video Watch how Clinton described her trip »

"I say a lot of things -- millions of words a day -- so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement," she said.

Millions of words a day? Could that be? So, I read out loud from the CNN piece for 5 seconds. I read seven words in five seconds.

12 X 7 = 84 words a minute.
60X 84 = 5040 words an hour
5040 X 24 = 120,960 [per day]

So, if she spoke non=stop for 24 hours, it still wouldn't be close to a million. OK, I know she doesn't count the words and this was simply a wild guess, but it's nice to know that someone who could be our president has a sense for numbers, not just so that she would realize it was probably impossible to say millions of words a minute [day]. But so when other large numbers are used, we can have confidence that she understands them and the implications.

More disturbing is the suggestion that because she talks all day, it's ok to 'misspeak' once in a while, because that would just be a 'misstatement.' Since we now know that she doesn't use millions of words a day, does that change anything? What is the difference between a misstatement and a lie? In this case painting a picture of running from a plane under fire when in fact she walked off, and according to the picture, she and Chelsea stopped to talk to a little girl.

Wouldn't a mother remember whether she put her daughter into a life threatening situation? I'd like to know if possibly there was some other flight when she came under fire. If there isn't some other flight she might have confused this one with - and she didn't mention one in her defense apparently - then this is all disturbing indeed. Embellishing one's stories may be ok for fishers, but it isn't ok for presidential candidates.

Or am I falling victim to anti-Clinton non-stories being leaked to the press?

1 comment:

  1. This reminds me of Al Gore singing about how his mother told him to look for the union label.

    ReplyDelete

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