HILLARY AND HILLARY

Hillary Clinton once claimed that she had been named after New Zealand's own Edmund Hillary. But, just like her story that she isn't a loyal servant of Wall Street, the story proved to be bogus.

THE NEXT PRESIDENT of the United States, the corporate-approved Hillary Clinton, once claimed she had been named after the first person to climb Mt Everest, Edmund Hillary.

In 1995, during a visit to Nepal, Clinton happened to bump into Ed Hilary at Katmandu airport before she departed for Bangladesh. It was a reportedly brief encounter - they shook hands and exchanged pleasantries and that was that. It was later that Clinton told reporters that her mother had named her after Ed Hillary.

The fundamental difficulty with this claim was that Ed Hillary didn't become a household name in the U.S. - because he had climbed Everest - until six years after Hillary Rodham was born.

But the story had legs and it showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs, nearly a decade later.

 But in 2006, during her campaign for re-election to the US Senate, she confessed - or more accurately, a campaign spokesperson confessed for her -that the story wasn't true. Hillary Clinton had made it all up.

Although that wasn't how Clinton's spokesperson framed it, describing it as "a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add"

Christopher Hitchens

Since Hillary's mother was no longer around to speak for herself, she conveniently took the fall for her daughter's flight of fantasy.

In 2008 the late Christopher Hitchens, no fan of either Bill or Hillary Clinton, brought up the whole affair in an article he wrote for Slate. He commented:

"For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her "greatness" (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done."