Hillary Clinton has a cornball sense of humor. Quelle surprise. I think most of us already knew this (but I'm not dissing the interesting knew anecdote you're offering or the commentary re. diplomatic matters).

What fascinates me about the Clintons (staunch Obama supporter though I am) is the funniness of the satirical little films she and Bill sometimes make. Such as their famous take-off on the old couple fussing about health insurance or what-not.

But, yes, her sense of humor is generally cheese-tastic.

"New" anecdote: I can spell. Really.

As a current resident of New Zealand, I can say that the five Kiwis I just told this joke to thought it was hilarious.

I was expecting something to do with sheep.

just goes to show......a joke is in the ear of the beholder.......It seemed to me to be complimentary.....

New Zealanders have been somewhat skeptical about Hillary Clinton ever since she met Sir Edmund Hillary, the first mountaineer to climb Everest, and mentioned that she had been named after him. It was later pointed out that Sir Edmund climbed Mt Everest six years after Hillary Clinton was born.

Jeez, stop your quibling over dates! What do you want? Someone who was in a madrassa at age six?

Okay, so a man's on a driving holiday in New Zealand when he sees a man standing by the road gripping a sheep. 'G'day' says the tourist. 'Are you shearing?' 'No, piss off and find your own.' ...

A grave insult? Are you [overly] serious? I don't know a wit [or is that whit?] about New Zealand politics, but I still thought the joke was worth a half-smirk. Okay, a quarter...

As for the [Sir Edmund] Hillary thing, I've heard it before and figured then it was what Hillary might have been told by family members as a teen or pre-teen because it sounded good.

This post is satire, right?

Oh, shut up.

Is it November yet?

I've lost my sense of humor, so I've no idea if that's a funny -- ha ha, not strange -- joke.

y'all are missing the point - this is the *experienced* Hillary, totally ballsing up current facts, and insulting a national leader. This is foreign policy expertise?

(altho having said that, I doubt Helen would be much bothered).

i don't get it.

I am losing respect for the Clintons by the day and I am beginning to understand why the rabid right-wing despised them so much. If Hillary is the Democratic nominee, I am voting for Nader.

Hmmm. So is this better than her "joke" about Gandhi?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/06/elec04.s.mo.farmer.clinton.ap/

yawn

Wasn't the Hillary named for Hillary thing a joke. In other words, wasn't she kidding? Not to be too critical but don't we want our politicians to have some sense of humor. Also, this sounds kinda like an 'Al Gore wasn't sung Union songs as lullabys!! - he's a liiaaaarrr!!' line of BS. He was joking - it was amusing. Take home message- even if media narriatives/novels help your candidate- avoid repeating them. You're a Democrat- the media is not your friend.

Obviously, all True Americans should be gravely concerned, and should base their vote on how seriously each candidate deals with New Zealand.

Hillary is relativistic, something mixing future and present.

Boring.

I have read the post and the entire thread, and eventhough I am an Obama supporter I have to say the Helen Clark "gaffe" isn't worth the space Rachel has devoted to it. We really need to focus on more important issues, like beating John McCain or changing the way cable news does business.

No one should be slagging off NZ. It would be a great place to move if McCain gets elected! Actually a great place to live under any circumstances.

blah blah blah

Holy f$*k! She did not say that about New Zealand! We are so screwed. Incompetent as he is, I hope Bush is on the phone right now with the embassy.

Seriously though . . . does Helen get treated as a bitch by her opponents? If so the joke hits too close to home to really be funny. Besides, I think I heard Helen say it before (when it was funny). The next time I hear it I'll probably start thinking about chocolate cake or something before it's over. But hey, I'm an eternal critic.

The joke compares Clark to cockroaches in a positive sense--she's super-tough, able to survive anything. It's no wonder Hillary likes it. Thing is, it would make a lot less sense if Clark were a former prime minister, who would no longer need to be that tough. So the gaffe actually ruined the joke as well as inadvertently insulting Clark by suggesting she's a has-been. Oopsie.

What a complete WASTE OF A POST!!! Of course it's what one has come to expect of the LET'S SLIME HILLARY CROWD (that apparently lives EVERYWHERE)...I'm still waiting to see/hear all the big money pundits (and lowly bloggers) mention that NEITHER candidate can get enough delegates to WIN the Democratic nomination...oh, I know it only counts for Hillary because Obama is covered in gold! For goodness sake (if I thought there was any "goodness" left in any of our media)...how about some actual accurate information!!!!!!

Re: Hillary link
Wow. Only seeing Hitchens in his dazed'n'confused mode on Maher makes you forget what a really faux-vitriolic writer he is.
The real masters, like Pope and Waugh, could write praise as fluently as blame; they worked from an absolute standard and loved those who surpassed it as much as they despised those who fell short.
But Hitchens is a pure hater, based upon his overflowing fount of genuine self-contempt.

Also, it's misleading to add a link saying "more here" and then link to the authors own blog with a exact copy of the same post and no new information

I like the way she uses the word "contretemps" to reinforce her working-class, beer-swilling image .

The cockroach joke is a pretty old one. To me it falls closer to plagiarism than insulting. Unless maybe Clark is 95 years old.

That is the most disgusting joke I have ever heard and further proof that Skank-arella Clinton is totally unfit to hold any kind of office. I,as a person who is married to a New Zealander,am extremely offended by this blatant disregard New Zealands head of state.

Thank you for sharing this political gaffe with us. Hopefully this will be the defining moment which enlightens the American public to the real Hillary Clinton.

OBAMA 08 - CHANGE WE CAN COUNT ON

I don't see anything wrong with the joke. I do hate the Clintons' endless lying about everything; but I already knew the Edmund Hillary story. Thanks anyway.

Isn't this sort of not a big deal?

Anyway- you can speculate in all sorts of directions about this one. Maybe she felt offended by something and was lashing out, because she's been feeling up-against-a-wall, and desperate.

I think Hillary is a bit of a square deep down inside, and so maybe she was just kind of not thinking + trying to be cool; maybe she thought it helped her if she could look down her nose at some big political woman she'd heard a lot of people hate, so she would sort of step out of the place of being the one a lot of people villify, and become the mudslinger herself. Sort of a strategy to combat misogyny that's aimed at her.

No, I don't think it was a good idea, but I do think 99.99% of people do something as dumb or dumber than this once a year. So she told a joke that flopped or offended somebody. If everybody who did that had to be considered contemptible we all would have almost no friends left, except for really boring, tame nerds.

Clark may be the current PM on the NZ side of the International Date Line, but PM isn't PM in the Western Hemisphere.

Or maybe it has something to do with the Coriolis Effect.

Completely OT, but I am amused to see a John McCain campaign ad on the right. Does WashMonthly get paid by click-thru or view?

A New Zealand man carries a sheep into the kitchen where his wife is cooking dinner. "I wanted you to see the pig I've been sleeping with," he says.

His wife looks up and down for a bit and says, "That's not a pig. That's a sheep."

"I wasn't talking to you."

Er yes isn't this joke intended as a compliment?

I suspect there's a high probability that Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney will be there playing cards with the cockroach and Helen Clark, perhaps in an undisclosed underground military facility of some sort.

Seriously, I don't see the insult in this joke.

Firedoglake has a piece on food riots and declining grain stocks. PA has a lame joke gaffe. Sheesh.

You guys aren't even phoning it in anymore.

Er yes isn't this joke intended as a compliment?

Of course it is. Hillary would love for it to be told about her by her own opponents. It's about survival against impossible odds that would wipe out lesser folks.

The "gaffe" part is that she referred to Clark as the "former" prime minister.

Hillary's "memory" doesn't connect with reality as much as we'd like.

I dunno, if some British or Canadian PM told a Hillary Clinton joke when a reporter prompted him/her for a joke, would we care and think it was a gaffe?

Cockroaches won't survive nuclear holocaust. if we go, they go too.

Peak oil, Pacific ocean filling up with plastic waste, worldwide food shortages, pharmaceuticals in the water, bees dying off, worldwide mass extinction of species, water shortages, Monsanto trying to control the world's seed supply, chemicals and toxins in everything we touch, breath and consume...

But yes, let's watch the Clinton and Obama camps call each other names. Good entertainment while we wait for civilization to collapse!

How to put this? Oh, I know:

Fuck off, "Rachel".

Read about the growing food shortages (this includes the US!):

http://lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/BreakingNews.html

For those who have forgotten what real problems look like.

If you want to read some real news, check out this.

It's a short article about CNN hiring Tony Snow, followed by a long list of amazing lies Tony Snow has told. The writer makes a lot of jokes, and maybe when something's as serious as this, that's not always the best idea. But it would be really great if this could get spread around really far and we could start taking stuff like this seriously, and maybe get towns and organizations and companies to issue resolutions condemning putting a liar like this on American news TV, etc.

This is satire, right? Or is Rachel just preparing questions for Charlie and George to ask during the next debate?

I'm offended that anyone would call Hillary's campaign a "Botched Joke."

pretend concern-trolling. I repeat: it's only a low-brow joke.

She said she had been told by her mom that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, a very different thing. It's just the sort of thing that a lot of parents might tell their entering-teenage daughters when those daughters ask the question.

I took the joke as a compliment too. I suspect you'll hate it if you hate Hillary, not so much otherwise. The Kiwi commenter (5 out of 5 liked it) should pretty well put an end to any idea that it's objectively insulting.

John

So nobody could name their child after Sir Edmund Hillary until he climbed Mount Everest?

He was alive when she was born, right? Was he famous when she was born? Isn't it possible that at birth she was named for the famous guy who later went on to climb Mt. Everest?

Talk about mountains and molehills.

Speaking of New Zealand, Hillary really blew it with her joke. She just lost the votes from all the US citizens who immigrated from New Zealand.

Personally I think anyone immigrating from New Zealand should have his/her head examined, but I suppose some people have a good reason for doing it.

And I always wondered, where is Old Zealand?

I guess Bush has done a lot of stuff like this, but with him it's different. Bush is the kind of guy who does something like all-of-a-sudden starts grinning at a speech he is giving to honor fallen soldiers when he delivers come grave remark- apparently because the spoiled child is resentful at having to get up off his ass, and do anything that remotely acknowledges he might be responsible for a lot of people getting hurt for the wrong reasons.

Maybe my example exagerrates a bit compared to what we usually see from him- I don't recall if he's ever done his inappropriate grin at a memorial service yet- but the point is, he does it so consistently that we know he does this stuff either on purpose, or because he has such a strong impulse to do it.

With Hillary it's different. She's a civilized human being, so if something like this slips out once a year, you can assume she probably actually wasn't trying to poke someone in the ribs, so to speak.

What that tells me is that Hillary travels in a pretty rarefied world if the only joke she knows relates to the politics of a small country in the Southern hemisphere. The best jokes, of course, are those that make fun of someone just like you. One might even say that those are the ONLY acceptable jokes for politicians, plus lawyer jokes.

a strong impulse to do it.

Or, "such a strong impulse to do it that he can't entirely control himself," I should say.

Anyway, the point is, with Bush, it becomes a story, because you know it's the latest event in a string of gaffes. With Hillary, it's not more newsworthy than a story that John Kerry was waiting in line at a military cafeteria and accidentally dropped his hot dog, or something.

Oh, posh. Talk about being easily offended and just plain silly. Obviously the point of the joke is something Hillary sees as a compliment to Ms. Clark -- that she's persistent and strong and can and will endure even through the greatest difficulty.

Barbara wrote:

The best jokes, of course, are those that make fun of someone just like you. One might even say that those are the ONLY acceptable jokes for politicians, plus lawyer jokes.

Funny, the Republicans don't limit themselves to that, and yet they get away with it all the time. I guess you're wrong, and it has more to do with the media being on their side, and not on Hillary's side (unless you call trying to make her look like a Repub during the Democratic presidential nomination race she's competing in being on her side-- kind of a troll's way of defining things).

Tripp: "And I always wondered, where is Old Zealand?"

Denmark. It's the island where Copenhagen is located.

Oh, and there's also the Dutch province of Zeeland, which is where New Zealand gets its name.

it's not more newsworthy than a story that John Kerry was waiting in line at a military cafeteria and accidentally dropped his hot dog, or something.

Oh I dunno. I can see the headline now: "Kerry exposes wiener in front of troops!"

Grumpy,

No offense man but we were talking about a country, not chewing tobacco. You can buy Copenhagen all over America.

I'm just funnin' ya. Dutch is where that lesbian guy stuck his wooden skates in the dike saving the country, right?

And the hit jobs keep coming. I guess after PA somebody is starting to sweat. Life is funny isn't it!

Of course, the Hilary/Hillary story might be true. For the first 6 years, she was known as "Hey, You!". Or maybe a family relative thought she'd never amount to a "hill of beans" and the name "Hilary" stuck...

Of course, the Hillary story might be true. For the first 6 years of her life, she was known as "Hey, You!", then Sir Edmund's exploit gave her a name.

Of course, too, a family relative maybe always said she'd never amount to a "hill of beans" and the name "Hillary" stuck.

I for one welcome HILL-ROD as our new Overlord.

...yawn, part deux...

I don't know. Is it just possible that Newsweek repeated the joke wrong? This is the magazine that gave us the Hitler Diaries and Joek Lien (now at Time) and George Fwill and Spikey Isikoff and that self-righteous blowhard prick Meacham. If the reporter thought the "former" was a mistake, wouldn't she have added a sic or noted the error?

Tripp, Edmund Hillary was entirely unknown when Hillary Clinton was born.

IMHO the problem with Hillary's joke about Helen Clark is that Hillary isn't a New Zealander. What I mean is, there are jokes about various minorities that are OK when a member of a group tells them, but which sound bigoted when someone not in the group tells them. The Helen Clark may fall in the same category.

Also, one's reaction depends on how one feels about the leader. If a foreign leader told and anti Bush joke, that would be one thing. But, if the foreign leader told an anti Obama joke, that might be something else.

I take Inkblot campaigning for 5 days and look what PA sinks to.

This is an assinine post. Why not comment about Hillary's wardrobe too?

I agree with the other commenter that that's the kind of thing that might just be (uninformed) family lore, and in any case it's no worse than saying JFK paid for your father to come to America from Kenya when he didn't. I believed that was an honest mistake on Barack's part, didn't you?

Nice try, though!

"this small but very important nation?"

Important in what way, exactly? They don't have the assets to provide significant support to anyone, least of all us, even if they were willing.

I flew out of and through New Zealand for years and think the country is very nice and the people are great. They host our semi-annual Deep Freeze missions to Antarctica.

But, aside from being one more vote we might, or might not, get in the UN, how is New Zealand important?

Dear Lucy Lawless*: Please endorse Obama.

*In the eyes of most Americans, New Zealand's best-known export. Plus, she portrayed Xena. Meanwhile, Hillary's acting like Callisto.

More evidence that Hillary hates women.

trashhauler: "Important in what way, exactly?"

If we didn't have a New Zealand, they would've had to film the Lord of the Rings in Vancouver, and that'd just be silly.

"If we didn't have a New Zealand, they would've had to film the Lord of the Rings in Vancouver, and that'd just be silly."
______________

Touche'

My parents told me I was named after Astronaut Neil Armstrong.

When I was confronted with the fact that he walked on the moon two years AFTER I was born, I was flabbergasted (at age 6).

My parents clarified: It was Armstrong's heroic actions during the Gemini 8 mission, where he commanded the first manned docking of two spacecraft - and was able to regain control of the capsule after an emergency separation when the unmanned Agena craft with which they were docked went into a rapid spin, due to a faulty maneuvering thruster on the Gemini capsule. His quick-thinking and instincts saved the mission from a horrible catastrophe.

I'm not sure what notable things Sir Hillary achieved prior to paying a bunch of Nepalese to haul his junk for him up to the top of Everest.

Did you really write about this? Seriously...is this a joke?

God the blogosphere is falling apart

Mythbusters actually disproved the first part of this joke; there are other insects that are more hearty than cockroaches in the wake of radiation from a nuclear blast

Lame post. Seriously.

Did you actually read the interview???? Do I have to spell it out?

The article starts talking about "...prayers... quotes and jokes, sent by Hillary Clinton's friends, intended to inspire and to buoy her through the tough times."

So Hillary listed a couple of inspirational lines and was then asked to tell a funny one. She wasn't making fun of Helen, she was actually showing that people make awful jokes about powerful women all over the world.

Helen Clark *is* the current prime minister but she has been in office since *1999* -- come on, quite natural for anyone to assume she's not in office anymore.

The hate just doesn't stop. And it's all Hillary (& campaign) fault, right?

Katie,

Seriously...is this a joke?

Of course - it is hilarius. I prefer the original Latin spelling.

This has got to be one of the stupidest posts I've ever seen. Hillary tells a joke, and once made a statement -- it might even be true -- that her mother told her she was named after some New Zealand guy, and this is important, how?

Please, lady, stay in New Zealand. We have enough of our own dumbfucks, and don't need to import any more.

Here's Hillary Clinton in a speech about gun ownership on Feb 18, 2008, in which she jokes and sneers at Dick Cheney over his shotgun accident: "Once he's out of the office and the Secret Service is not around to protect people from him, we'd better be careful about where he goes hunting. A little gun safety protocol would be useful, don't you think." Cheney's was a tragic hunting accident that shouldn't be sneered over. If you disagree about that, you can at least appreciate that such a mentality could foment political acrimony and paralysis with the other side of the aisle. I think she despises Republicans and they despise her.

New Zealand is "very important" - now THAT's pure comedy gold.

As an American, I apologize on behalf of Hillary Clinton and all other Americans for any offense her attempt at humor (do you guys call it humour?) caused.

Let's just hope an ugly international incident can be avoided. What would we be talking about here, anyway? You guys wouldn't allow us to film the next hobbits movie there?

But I have a joke to make recompense: If all Kiwi's are as humourless as you, Ms. Morris, it's very lucky for the Kiwi menfolk (menfoulk?) that there are so many sheep availaible.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry... The greatest insult is that this is piece on nonsense is being posted on this blog... will it never end??