Because She Can

From the January, 2003, issue of Psychiatric News, a publication of the American Psychiatric Association:

Charles Dike, M.D., a forensic psychiatrist and clinical instructor in psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, maintains that psychiatrists need to pay attention to pathological lying so they are able to inform the legal system about whether pathological liars should be held responsible for their behavior. He believes as well that it is time for psychiatrists to assess whether pathological lying "represents only a symptom of a pre-existing psychiatric disorder or is a coherent enough entity" to be included as a separate diagnosis in APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).

[snip]

Defining the concept is a crucial step in analyzing the concept of pathological lying from a psychiatric viewpoint, and Dike described it as repeated lies told over a number of years for which an external reason is not easily discernable. These lies are often "woven into complex narratives," he pointed out. "In pathological lying, telling lies may often seem to be an end in itself . . . .the pathological liar may become a prisoner of his lies, [and] the desired personality of the pathological liar may overwhelm the actual one."

From today's New York Times:

For more than a decade, one piece of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s informal biography has been that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest. The story was even recounted in Bill Clinton’s autobiography.

But yesterday, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign said she was not named for Sir Edmund after all.

“It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add,” said Jennifer Hanley, a spokeswoman for the campaign.

In May 1953, Sir Edmund and his Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay, became the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest. In 1995, shortly after meeting Sir Edmund, Mrs. Clinton said that her mother, Dorothy Rodham, had long told her she was named for the famous mountaineer.

“It had two l’s, which is how she thought she was supposed to spell Hillary,” Mrs. Clinton said at the time, after meeting Sir Edmund. “So when I was born, she called me Hillary, and she always told me it’s because of Sir Edmund Hillary.”

Even though Bill Clinton repeated the story in his 2004 autobiography, “My Life,” Hillary Clinton did not mention it in her own autobiography, “Living History,” which was published in 2003.

But one big hole has been poked in the story over the years, both in cyberspace and elsewhere: Sir Edmund became famous only after climbing Everest in 1953. Mrs. Clinton, as it happens, was born in 1947.

Students of Clintonology will recognize that the senator has here attempted to explain away one impulsive self-aggrandizing lie with a second more coldly calculated falsehood. We leave it to afficionados the delicate task of determining which is the more morally reprehensible, and which the more blatant. With the first, she impulsively attempted to make a meeting with a truly heroic person instead congruent with her own view of the universe: all about Hilly. With the second, she has decided to cauterize an embarrassing and wholly unnecessary injury to her credibility by tossing her mother over the side: "I'm not a liar, but you should have heard my mom."

I guess you get the political leaders you deserve, but what did we do to deserve this?