When it emerged that NBC News anchor Brian Williams had misled the
public for years with a harrowing account of coming under enemy fire on
a military helicopter during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, observers were
quick to draw comparisons with other public figures caught telling tall
tales about combat experiences. Some hearkened back to Hillary Clinton’s
bogus 2008 assertion that she had landed “under sniper fire� during a
trip to Bosnia a dozen years earlier; in reality, video from the trip
showed a smiling Clinton and her daughter walking calmly on the tarmac,
with no sign of trouble whatsoever.

There’s another figure who merits mention in this discussion, one whose
serial blurring of lines between fiction and reality was a mainstay of
his public career. That figure, of course, was Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s fibs were manifold. They included his campaign-trail tale of a
“Chicago welfare queen� with 80 aliases, 30 addresses, and 12 Social
Security cards, whom he alleged had claimed “over $150,000″ in
government benefits. The woman whom Reagan made infamous was convicted
of using only two aliases, used to collect $8,000.

Once in office, Reagan’s deception in the Iran-Contra scandal briefly
threatened his presidency. First, Reagan flatly denied wrongdoing,
publicly declaring, “We did not — repeat, did not — trade weapons or
anything else for hostages, nor will we.� Months later, when subsequent
revelations rendered that assertion untenable, Reagan delivered an Oval
Office address in which he tried to reconcile his public claims with the
factual record. “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not
trade arms for hostages,� Reagan said. “My heart and my best intentions
still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is
not.�

But Reagan’s fabrications also included whoppers about conflict zones
reminiscent of those put forth by Williams and Clinton. During Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s November 1983 visit to the U.S., Reagan
told Shamir that during his service in the U.S. Army film corps, he and
fellow members of his unit personally shot footage of the Nazis’
concentration camps as they were liberated. Reagan would tell this story
again to others, including Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal. But
Reagan was never present at the camps’ liberation. Instead, he spent the
war in Culver City, California, where he processed footage from the
liberation of the camps.

An excerpt from:

http://tinyurl.com/muw3xuy

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Proud to be a Liberal.