FULL METAL HILLARY: “Hillary Rodham Clinton said that she once visited a recruiting office in Arkansas to inquire about joining the Marines,” the New York Times reported in 1994:
She told the group gathered for lunch in the Dirksen Office Building, according to The Associated Press, that she became interested in the military in 1975, the year she married Bill Clinton and the year she was teaching at the University of Arkansas law school in Fayetteville.
She was 27 then, she said, and the Marine recruiter was about 21. She was interested in joining either the active forces or the reserves, she recalled, but was swiftly rebuffed by the recruiter, who took a dim view of her age and her thick glasses. ‘Not Very Encouraging’
“You’re too old, you can’t see and you’re a woman,” Mrs. Clinton said she was told, adding that the recruiter dismissed her by suggesting she try the Army. “Maybe the dogs would take you,” she recalled the recruiter saying.
Hillary claiming that sexism played a role seems kind of odd, considering that women served in the Marines in World War I – and World War II (see also: Bea Arthur, WWII Marine truck driver), and that Hillary’s spouse wasn’t exactly a pro-military guy himself during this period.
In any case, “It was not a very encouraging conversation,” Hillary claimed. “I decided maybe I’ll look for another way to serve my country.”
Which leads us to…2001: A Hillary Odyssey! “When she was younger, Hillary Clinton dreamt of being an astronaut:”
That’s what the 2016 Democratic frontrunner said during a New Hampshire town hall event on Thursday when Clinton was asked if she supports space exploration and investment in NASA.
“When I was a little girl, I guess I was a teenager by then, I was you know like 14 I think and the space program was getting started and I wanted to be an astronaut,” Clinton said. “I wrote to NASA and I said what do I have to do to be prepared to be an astronaut and they wrote back and said thank you very much but we’re not taking girls.”
Clinton added that she doesn’t lose sleep over the rejection, noting “that thankfully changed with Sally Ride and a lot of the other great women astronauts.” But the former secretary of state made clear that she wholeheartedly supports NASA’s planetary exploration.
And speaking of daunting explorations, Hillary of course also once claimed she was named after the man who bested Mount Everest – despite her being born in 1947 and Sir Edmund Hillary reaching the top of Everest in 1953.
(And don’t get her started on taking sniper fire in Bosnia.)
No word yet if Hillary also took the initiative to clean up the pollution at Love Canal, invented the Internet and/or inspired Erich Segal’s Love Story.