The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Hillary Clinton: "A Wee Bit Silly"

Phony "experience" alert!  For those who haven't seen this, the Daily Telegraph, with the assistance of Northern Irish politico (and Nobel prize winner) David Trimble, has effectively dismembered Hillary Clinton's claim, made on CNN last week, that "I helped bring peace to Northern Ireland." Trimble, the leader of the main Protestant political party at the time, says that while he did meet Hillary a few times in Belfast, "there was nothing that she did, apart from accompanying Bill" that he can remember: "Being a cheerleader for something is different from being a major player."

More damning, in my view, was the Telegraph's investigation into Hillary's claim to have met with a group of Northern Irish women in the Belfast "town hall," bringing together "for the first time Catholics and Protestants"; in an account she gave last January in New Hampshire, she implied that this was a major event, an encounter between people who had only just stopped shooting each other. The Telegraph could find no record of anything like that. Instead, according to their reporter, Hillary seems be referring to a 50-minute meeting in a cafe, mostly between women who, though coming from different sides of the religious divide, knew each other already and had met many times before.

CNN itself has already "fact-checked" this, sort of, and the Washington Post also gave Hillary "one Pinocchio" for exaggeration in January. You can also find plenty of debunking of Hillary's Northern Irish experience on Obama Web sites. But I think the Telegraph version is pretty definitive.