KEY POINTS:
Memory isn't always a reliable witness. There's the tendency to look back through rose-tinted spectacles or treat the passage of time as a licence to put a gloss on modest achievements. Someone once estimated that the number of New Zealand males claiming to have had an All Black trial defied common sense, logistics and demographics.
A little spicing up is human but there's a point at which embellishment becomes fantasy or fraud. I've never had to scuttle across an airport tarmac through a hail of sniper fire, but I imagine it's one of those experiences that remain fresh in the memory.
Names and faces might fade but the sound of bullets whistling past your ear would surely stay with you. It would be a bit like winning Lotto or giving birth to triplets: you'd remember it as if it happened yesterday. There can't be many women who've had kids one at a time but somehow got it into their heads that they arrived in a batch.
Hillary Clinton's sniper fire falsehood came hard on the heels of her ludicrous claim to have played a key part in the Northern Ireland peace process and her silly little fib about being named after New Zealand's favourite son. No wonder they say the Clintons will always choose to tell a big lie when a small lie will suffice, and a small lie when the truth will suffice.
It calls into question the premise upon which her candidacy is largely based - that being first lady for eight years is a gilt-edged qualification for the presidency.
This is accepted wisdom in Argentina, where politics is a blend of reality show and soap opera (Meet the Kirchners), and parts of Africa where government tends to be a family affair. But in the western democracies you're expected to get there under your own steam.
How would you feel if you heard this from the flight deck: "This is your captain speaking; I've never done this before but my husband's a pilot and we talk about his work all the time?" Clinton supporters would argue that flying a plane and other activities that come to mind in this context - brain surgery, for instance - require specialist training and technical expertise, whereas political leadership is about character and experience.
The problem there is that Ms Clinton's dishonest attempts to parlay her largely ornamental role as first lady into hands-on leadership experience doesn't say much about her character.
By contrast, Barack Obama's problems are largely not of his making, unless it's his fault his father was a black man. He's been deemed guilty by association of reverse racism because the former pastor of his Afro-American church has said some harsh, even inflammatory things about America's treatment of its black population.
The longer the controversy rumbles on, the more valid Reverend Jeremiah Wright's critique appears to be. Not surprisingly given the damning statistics, no one is disputing his core assertion that the US Government has failed the vast majority of its citizens of African descent, but the impression that some white Americans don't mind a black man running for President as long as his blackness is only skin-deep is inescapable.
Obama's patriotism has been questioned on the grounds that true patriots don't criticise their country or associate with those who do. There's always a moment in presidential elections when we're reminded of Samuel Johnson's dictum that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
More problematic for Obama are the reverend's wilder flights of rhetoric, notably his claim that the US invented the HIV virus to kill off black people.
The fact that Wright sometimes spouted paranoid nonsense doesn't invalidate his wider message. After all, plenty of apparently well-adjusted people entertain lurid conspiracy theories about 9/11.
The extent to which the race cat is out of the bag was evident from the mixed response to Obama's speech in which he confronted the issue. He revealed his white grandmother - "Who loves me more than anyone in the world" - had sometimes made racist remarks.
His point was that people are complex bundles of instinct, conditioning, intellect and conscience, contradictory beings whose actions may be more admirable than their words. Among other things, he was cutting white America some slack.
His critics didn't see it that way. They accused him of engaging in racial stereotyping. I suppose that represents progress of sorts.
