This latest misspeak was a big one for Hillary Clinton. There’s only one other gaffe that she has made that I am aware of that is of a similar magnitude and which causes the same underlying unease and that, of course , would be the airport sniper fire comment.
The unease is caused because both statements are so divorced from what the majority of people call “reality”. I won’t comment about the Tuzla airport gaffe so much only because there is no need to — what Hillary recalled happening simply didn’t happen. Her plane mates know it didn’t happen and there is video that shows it didn’t happen.
There’s no need for much investigation about the recollection of Nancy Reagan as a “very effective, low key advocate” on AIDS/HIV , because there are still enough of us around who remember that the reality was the exact opposite.
So Hillary Clinton lives in a different reality regarding AIDS than the rest of us do. If she said what she said as a conscious revisionism in an attempt to burnish the Reagan legacy or sign onto it, that is unconscionable, not to mention stupid because of the aforementioned witnesses who lived through the Reagan silence and disinterest saw people die around them.
But the other choice is that Hillary believed what she said when she said it. Is that more comforting? How could someone in her position of power and leadership be so completely, totally off-base in her recollections? Since we’re talking about Reagan here, she’s veering into territory that Reagan pioneered, when he offered up movie vignettes as his personal experience.
The third option is that she simply screwed up and inserted AIDS instead of something else, except that then her statement makes, if possible, even less sense than what we began with. There is no substitute disease/condition that suits the frame she surrounded it with.
Here’s the biggest problem: if you look at the tape of the interview , Hillary is earnest, commanding and authoritative about something we know to be completely, and objectively false.
It doesn’t really matter if option 1, 2, or 3 is the underlying motivation : she could be consciously pandering, she could be living an alternate reality, or she could be so screwed up she literally doesn’t know what she is talking about but regardless of all options she is still wrong and acting/believing she is right.
And she is confused about why so many Americans have a trust issue with her?