Honestly, I'm somewhat embarrassed to think that the voters of New Hampshire were conned by the few tears Hillary Clinton squeezed out in the run-up to our primary, especially since it happened in Portsmouth where our sea-faring heritage is supposed to have toughened us up. So, I'm primed, I suspect, for any explanation that shifts the onus back where it belongs--on the conner, rather than the conned. A pattern of deception might do that.

As the campaign has progressed through the states, Hillary Clinton has increasingly focused on Barack Obama's deficits, according to her lights, rather then her own talents and achievements. But, back in January, just before the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton was still talking about herself in Nashua, New Hampshire, as this story in the Telegraph reports:

Central to Mrs Clinton’s claim of an important Northern Ireland role is a meeting she attended in Belfast in with a group of women from cross-community groups. "I actually went to Northern Ireland more than my husband did," she said in Nashua, New Hampshire on January 6th.

"I remember a meeting that I pulled together in Belfast, in the town hall there, bringing together for the first time Catholics and Protestants from both traditions, having them sitting a room where they had never been before with each other because they don’t go to school together, they don’t live together and it was only in large measure because I really asked them to come that they were there.

"And I wasn’t sure it was going to be very successful and finally a Catholic woman on one side of the table said, ’You know, every time my husband leaves for work in the morning I worry he won’t come home at night.

"And then a Protestant woman on the other side said, ’Every time my son tries to go out at night I worry he won’t come home again’. And suddenly instead of seeing each other as caricatures and stereotypes they saw each other as human beings and the slow, hard work of peace-making could move forward."

There is no record of a meeting at Belfast City Hall, though Mrs Clinton attended a ceremony there when her husband turned on the Christmas tree lights in November 1995.

The reason this report seems so late is that it's bringing forward a bit of history in the context of Hillary Clinton's claim in recent days to have helped bring peace to Northern Ireland. This prompted one of the participants, Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province, to comment that the former First Lady was being "a wee bit silly" and the Telegraph confirmed that the meeting she described for (presumably Protestant and Catholic) voters in Nashua never happened.

Perhaps the stress of her inevitability being in jeopardy caused her to fall into a period of confabulation in New Hampshire. But, what I want to point out, in addition to the apparent deception in relating an event that never happened to her, is Hillary Clinton's assertion that sitting down over tea and crumpets is all it takes to make peace. Because, if that part of her narrative is accurate, then her earlier derision of Barack Obama for wanting to negotiate with disagreeable people is contradicted by her own experience. Unless what she's saying is "why bother negotiating when tea and cookies will do the trick?"

Do I believe any of it? Frankly, no. What's becoming increasingly evident is that, despite her training as a lawyer, Hillary Clinton has little regard for the injunction to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," and that, like William Clinton and George W. Bush, her inclination is to either leave a lot out (not the whole) or load it up with enough peripherals (not nothing but) to distract and deceive us.

Why would she do that? Well, for most people, a lie is self-protective. They lie in order not to expose what foolish or stupid things they've done. But, it seems that for some people the lie is an instrument of self-promotion. Which is why they don't even care much if the deception is exposed. And which is why their lies almost seem purposeless or counter-productive. But, they're not. The purpose of such lies is to deceive the audience and prompt people to take actions that they might not otherwise take. So, for example, the purpose of the story in Nashua was to get New Hampshire voters, who for the most part don't have much in common with someone from New York, Illinois or Arkansas, to cast their ballots on the basis of Hillary Clinton's claimed support for Catholics and Protestants and peace. And it worked. A sufficient number clearly forgot all about her vote authorizing the bombing of millions of Muslims in Iraq.

Which leaves us with the question of how we can protect ourselves from people whose disdain for the truth and for the people they address seems so ingrained. The answer, I think, is to just not believe anything such a person says. Just tune her out.