Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Hillary Clinton lies about Tuzla


Hillary Clinton and I seem to have spent some time in the same locations in Eastern Europe. When I was working for the OSCE via the US State Department in Bosnia as an election monitor in the late '90s, I was more or less stationed in
Tuzla for the bulk of our training and debriefing. She and I seem to have different recollections of the place.

I don't recall anything about having to wear a helmet or run from snipers - in fact several other monitors and I rented an orange VW mini-bus and driver named Mustafa to take us to Sarajevo via the so-called "Snipers' Alley" route (isn't that a line from "Convoy"..?). Everyone made it out just fine.

There was a very real worry about landmines, one that persists to this day, and we received landmine awareness training from the Swedish Army. I don't think anyone was about to walk the Clintons over to a minefield, or even on any grass or mud at all, so I rather doubt she was in much danger on that front either. Your other worries in Bosnia are the rampant drunk drivers, in conjunction with the guardrail-less hill curves. Traffic fatalities appear to be rather high, and car carcasses pile up two and three deep on hillside curves.

Outside of the Republika Srpska, which Tuzla is, SFOR had pretty tight control over the place. I recall my area was under the aforementioned Swedish military control, with some American troops in the area and UN police around too. There was also a pro-NATO Bosnian military with a base right in the city, a base that I got pulled into at gunpoint because I took a photo of it, which was dumb (a story for another time.)

Tuzla is a nice little European town, and I enjoyed my time there. People seemed sick of war and wanted to return to normal life, including the relatively high economic standards Yugoslavia enjoyed apart from most of communist Europe. There was slaughter there, I saw bullet holes and shell wounds on the buildings and landscape everywhere. I frequently passed the spot where,
in May 1995, 71 mostly young people were killed and over 150 injured when an ethnic Serb militia's shell slammed into the marketplace. But that was long before Clinton and I were there, and she knows it. Continued use of other peoples' tragedies like that sickens me.

When we were there, Mrs. Clinton, Tuzla was a great place to enjoy a cold liter of Tuzlanski Pilsner and some frites at that restuarant staffed by prisoners, the one with the Persian name. We didn't have to wear helmets or dodge bullets. Shame on you.

More shame on you for shrilly insisting that NATO kill and terrorize Serb civilians on the other side of that conflict. This includes the use of cluster bombs which might kill people who haven't even been born yet for decades to come. You are clearly unfit for the office of president (not that I didn't know that already, Part 1 Part 2 Part 3). I have a feeling that if you were to land in Beograd, you'd need that helmet.

I also happened to have briefly worked in Estonia shortly after HRC was dispatched there for a photo-op to divert attention from whatever she was embroiled in at home at the time. It so happens I met the premier Estonian-English interpreter on Earth, and she had been Clinton's translator for about four days. Her opinion? HRC was a "bitch" and, she thought, a lesbian, although the second part was hinted at incompletely in ways that leave me skeptical. On the whole Eastern Europe is gay-unfriendly and I imagine that people see gay where they like, which is to say in people they dislike. When pressed - and this came up in conversation twice - she said "Trust me, she's a lesbian."

How unfortunate for lesbians if true; the vast majority I meet are always so nice...

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