Thirty-five years of slightly relevant experience

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It’s been a bad news cycle for Hillary Clinton. After ABC News rushed to discover whether the former first lady had been in the White House on blue-dress day, other news organizations scoured the 11,000-plus pages released by the National Archives for evidence of Clinton’s expansive claims about her foreign-policy experience in her husband’s White House.

The Guardian sniffed around her scheduling records and found, on an “initial reading,” that Hillary wasn’t always exactly an eyewitness to power:

On the day that dozens of US cruise missiles rained down on Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country’s onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, first lady Hillary Clinton was far from the White House war room: instead she was touring ancient Egyptian ruins, including King Tut’s tomb and the temple of Hatshepsut. And on the day before the signing of the Good Friday agreement in Belfast she was at an event called “Hats on for Bella” in Washington.

Ouch. I wonder, though, what if we had we discovered that the former first lady was in the Situation Room with Sandy Berger and Wes Clark, pointing out bombing targets on a map? That wouldn’t have played well, either.