all-encompassingly

sir edmund hillary, the first guy to reach the summit of mount everest, died today. that’s bad timing for another hillary, hillary clinton, because it has the potential to make an old news story reappear. Doubly so because now someone, maybe a republican in the general election, might use the issue against her (did she lie about how she got the name? did she lie about everything between 1993 and 2001?).

During an April 1995 visit to Tibet, Hillary Clinton met New Zealand’s Sir Edmund Hillary, co-first-climber of Mount Everest. Clinton remarked that her mother, Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham, had told her that she was named after the famous climber. “It had two L’s, which is how she thought she was supposed to spell Hillary,” Clinton said at the Tibet meeting. “So when I was born, she called me Hillary, and she always told me it’s because of Sir Edmund Hillary.”

However, the Everest climb did not take place until 1953, more than five years after Clinton was born. Clinton opponents have used the discrepancy as evidence towards the charge that she is prone to fabrications. Clinton said that her mother read about beekeeper-turned-mountaineer Edmund Hillary in a publication while pregnant in 1947 and liked the name and thus used the two L’s form. Some searches of prominent U.S. publications show no publicity given to Edmund Hillary before the Everest climb, so it is unlikely that Dorothy Rodham (who has not publicly spoken about the issue) would have heard of him. Furthermore, Hillary with two L’s was not that unusual a spelling at the time. Snopes.com concluded that Hillary Clinton probably made up the naming story as “a little white lie concocted for a special occasion.” Finally, in October 2006, a spokeswoman for Senator Clinton’s re-election campaign explained that she was not in fact named after the mountain climber, stating rather that “It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.” [source: hillaryproject.com

so people catch her in a lie and she has a staffer place the blame with her mom?