Clinton vs. Obama: Credibility, Exaggerations, and Lies
by Mdm Prz 08, Wed Mar 26, 2008 at 11:17:16 PM EDT
With all the media hubbub surrounding Senator Clinton's 1996 Bosnia trip, you'd think the woman had never been to Bosnia, or that she just took a trip to the beach and worked on her tan with her daughter.
There have been accusations that she has lied about her trip. Some pundits are claiming it calls her credibility into question.
Let's just get one thing straight, right here, and now - there is a huge difference between lying and misspeaking. I'll even go further, because there are some who hear everything Senator Clinton says under the veil of suspicion and believe her capable of calculating every single word she ever utters and incapable of "misspeaking," and I will call her misspeak an exaggeration. I chose to call it an exaggeration, because similar to a lie, they both require a purposeful action - they are not accidents. But that is where the similarity ends.
An exaggeration, has a foundation of truth. To exaggerate means to represent as greater than is actually the case, or to overstate. A lie on the other hand, has absolutely no ounce of truth. A lie is a false statement deliberately presented as being true. To lie means to present false information with the intent of deceiving.
One can say she exaggerated the dangerousness of the trip, but one cannot say she lied and said the trip was dangerous. There were snipers. It was a potential war zone. It was dangerous. It was not a lie, it was an exaggeration.






