|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 27 October 2016, during an otherwise typical on-air rant against Democrat Hillary Clinton, conservative radio pundit Rush Limbaugh had this to say about the presidential candidate's primary means of transportation: Though Limbaugh didn't cite a source for that tidbit, it was quite possibly The Washington Times, which had run an editorial saying much the same thing two weeks earlier: Like the more general partisan caricature of Hillary Clinton as an evil witch, the charge that she is vulgar and verbally abusive with subordinates is longstanding (Snopes.com assessed such claims as far back as 2007). Most of the commonly cited instances, however, which allegedly took place while the Clintons resided in the White House between 1993 and 2001, have proved to be anecdotal and impossible to confirm. The specific claim that military and/or security personnel have at one time or another designated Hillary Clinton's aircraft Broomstick One first surfaced in December 2003, a few weeks after Clinton (then a U.S. Senator from New York) toured military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a typical example of what circulated via forwarded e-mail: The above text is similar to a variant posted 18 December 2003 on the political message board Free Republic, where commenters found it simultaneously questionable and amusing: Its veracity was rightly questioned from the start. In addition to being purely anecdotal — not a single source was cited, then or since — every telling of the story omitted a crucial detail about Sen. Clinton's four-day trip, namely that she wasn't traveling alone. According to newspaper accounts, she toured Afghanistan and Iraq in the company of fellow senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island). And while the fact that it was a joint mission doesn't, by itself, invalidate the notion that the troops could have came up with a special nickname for Hillary's Black Hawk helicopter, it does cast doubt on it. In any case, the claim has never been proved. Apart from forwarded e-mails, the story's next appearance was in a collection of Marine Corps humor, The Older We Get, the Better We Were: More Marine Corps Sea Stories and Politically Incorrect Common Sense, written by Andrew Anthony Bufalo and published in 2004: Broomstick One made a brief Internet comeback during Clinton's 2008 presidential primary campaign against Democratic rival Barack Obama, appearing in joke posts like this one, dated 9 April 2008: Eight years later, it would become a staple of the 2016 election cycle, often accompanied by additional spurious claims such as that Broomstick One is Clinton's Secret Service codename (her actual codename is Evergreen), and that Broomstick One was referenced in one or more WikiLeaks e-mails (we've searched in vain for any such reference). Here is a sampling of what the joke looked like on Twitter, right up until a month before the election:
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}