Blue Crab Boulevard

Resume Inflation

One of the Nobel Peace Prize winning negotiators who won the prize for brokering the Irish Good Friday agreement that paved the way for peace in Northern Ireland is debunking Hillary Clinton's claims that she was a key player in the accords. He and others who negotiated the difficult agreements say she was little more than a tourist, nothing more than a peripheral character.

Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a "wee bit silly" for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.

"I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around," he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely "the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets" during elections. "She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player."

Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am.

"I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland," she told CNN on Wednesday. But negotiators from the parties that helped broker the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 told The Daily Telegraph that her role was peripheral and that she played no part in the gruelling political talks over the years.

The funniest part of the article is Clinton's claim that she "pulled together" a meeting of some Irish women. In actually, she attended a small photo-op pulled together by the US Consulate where the press far outnumbered the few participants and Clinton is best remembered for admiring the teapot.

It is nothing new for a politician to inflate their resumes, of course. But this is a bit much. Claiming to be a key player just because she happened to accompany Bill on a few trips is wild exaggeration.

Politics | Gaius March 8, 2008

By GM Cassel AMH1(AW) USN RET, March 8, 2008 @ 6:06 am

I guess no one had previously informed the Irish that Hillary was so important to the process. HMMMMM!
By daveinboca, March 8, 2008 @ 7:06 am

Are the Irish certain that she didn’t do the entire deal with magical thinking behind the scenes?

Didn’t she help Al Gore invent the internet? Or was it the lockbox?
By kidrob, March 8, 2008 @ 7:20 am

im appauled! ibrokered the treaty!
By Mockinbird, March 8, 2008 @ 10:13 am

No, I did!
By martian, March 8, 2008 @ 1:14 pm

This is not the first time her role or actually, her lack of a role, in Ireland has been brought to question. It has been brought up several times. However, this is the first time her role has been questioned by so central a player in the real process. If the same kind of digging is done with her other experiential claims I’m very sure they will be found just as baseless. It’s as I have been saying for months – what experience? The only direct experience she had during the Slick Willie years was when he put her in charge of creating a universal health care program – and that failed miserably. Since she has been in the Senate she has neither written or sponsored any major legislation (at least not as the principal) and the only thing she has accomplished was that she managed to get re-elected.

Sleeping next to a president (if they even did that considering Slick Willie’s proclivities) does NOT make one qualified to be president! If it did Jennifer Flowers and Monica Lowinski would have just as good a claim on being qualified for the Presidency! You don’t get executive and foriegn policy experience through osmosis. And you don’t get it by drinking tea with the ladies while the real players are elsewhere doing the real work.