One of the hallmarks of Hillary Clinton’s political life has been to manufacture relatives and events that could not have possibly happened and use them to make some imagined point about her qualifications. This is understandable. Hillary Clinton is the prime example of a woman who got to the top by sleeping with a successful man in the same symbiotic relationship that a remora has with a shark,

At various times Hillary Clinton has claimed to have been named after famous mountaineer, Sir Edmund Hillary (she was born in October 1947 and Sir Edmund made his first ever climb of a minor peak in New Zealand in January 1948), and to have been the grandchildren of immigrant textile workers (one grandfather was an immigrant from England) thereby giving her the ability to understand the plight of immigrants. Then there was her combat experience in Tuzla when she came under sniper fire.

She has even peddled the story that once she tried to enlist in the US Marines. Here is the totally credulous Michael Crowley of The New Republic mindlessly taking dictation from Hillary’s staff:

In 1975, just months after the last U.S. troops returned home, Hillary was living in Arkansas with Bill, who had mounted a failed bid for Congress the previous year. The young couple, who would marry later that year, were both teaching law at the University of Arkansas, when Hillary, for reasons never made entirely clear, decided to enlist in the Marines. When she walked into a recruiting office in Little Rock and inquired about joining, the recruiter on duty was unenthusiastic about the 27-year-old law professor in thick, goggle glasses. “You’re too old, you can’t see, and you’re a woman,” Clinton recalled him saying. “Maybe the dogs”–Marine slang for the Army–“would take you.” Deflated, Clinton said she decided to “look for another way to serve my country. “

For a lot of reasons, this story looks to be bullsh** on toast. Any lawyer entering a recruiting office would have been referred to a JAG recruiter. In 1975 if you could fog a mirror you could enlist. She was already engaged to Bill Clinton. I’m sympathetic to the idea that she was looking for a way out but I doubt it. Jim Geraghty did an extensive take down of this.

Now she’s recycling a story that first surfaced in 1994. Via National Journal:

When she was younger, Hillary Clinton dreamt of being an astronaut.

That’s what the 2016 Democratic front-runner said during a New Hampshire town hall event on Thursday when asked if she supports space exploration and investment in NASA.

“When I was a little girl—I guess I was a teenager by then—I was, you know, like, 14, I think, and the space program was getting started, and I wanted to be an astronaut,” Clinton said. “I wrote to NASA and I said, ‘What do I have to do to be prepared to be an astronaut?’ And they wrote back and said, ‘Thank you very much but we’re not taking girls.’ ”

Clinton added that she doesn’t lose sleep over the rejection, noting “that thankfully changed with Sally Ride and a lot of the other great women astronauts.” But the former secretary of State made clear that she wholeheartedly supports NASA’s planetary exploration.

The 1994 story goes like this:

Mrs. Clinton herself described what she recalls was “a wonderful, stable upbringing.”

When she was in junior high school in Park Ridge, ILL., Hillary Rodham wanted to be an astronaut.

“President Kennedy had just started the drive to the moon, and this was, like 1961, and I was, like, 14 or so,” she recalled.

“So I wrote a letter to NASA and asked them what [I had to] do to be an astronaut. I told them something about myself..and they wrote back and said, ‘We are not accepting girls as astronauts.’ Which was very infuriating.”

There are a lot of reasons to suspect this story is just as truthful as her Marine story and here Sir Edmund story and her Tuzla story and her grandparents story and her cattle futures story and her Rose Law firm story and her Benghazi story and… you get the idea.

The first astronaut class was formed in 1959. It was all military test pilots. It wasn’t open to the public.

Although NASA planned an open competition for its first astronauts, President Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted that all candidates be test pilots. Because of the small space inside the Mercury spacecraft, candidates could be no taller than 5 feet 11 inches (180 cm) and weigh no more than 180 pounds (82 kg).^[2] Other requirements included an age under 40, a bachelor’s degree or equivalent, 1,500 hours of flying time, and qualification to fly jets.^[3]:14

The second class was formed in 1961.

While the Original 7 had been selected to accomplish the simpler task of orbital flight, the new challenges of rendezvous and lunar landing led to the selection of candidates with advanced engineering degrees (for four of the New Nine) as well as test pilot experience. Two of this group had been candidates for the original 7, but were not selected then for medical reasons

The third class was formed in 1963.

Fourteen astronauts made up Group 3. Four died in training accidents before they could fly in space. All of the surviving ten flew in the Apollo program; five also flew Gemini missions. Aldrin, Bean, Cernan and Scott walked on the Moon. They are the only ones of the first 19 NASA astronaut groups to have no members at all fly on the Space Shuttle.

Group 3 was the first to waive the requirement of a test pilot background, though military jet fighter aircraft experience was substituted. This applied to Aldrin and Cernan; all the others were test pilots.

If Clinton had heard about the astronaut program it is highly unlikely that anyone, even the most callous bureaucrat, would tell a 14 year old girl we don’t take you because you’re ugly, have cankles and are a liar you’re a girl. They would have told her the criteria, etc. In fact, the “we’re not accepting girls” is not even true.

Clinton is trying to make up for a life spent drafting on the slipstream of powerful men. She is a mediocrity on her best day. On her worst she’s an addled old grandma screaming for pudding and attention.