An AP story from Saturday on Hillary Clinton's campaign trip to New Hampshire includes these gems (emphasis mine):
Clinton acknowledged "a great deal of frustration and anger and outrage" over the war, and said she was working hard in the Senate to pass legislation capping troop levels in Iraq. She also vowed to try to bring to a vote a resolution disapproving of President Bush's planned troop increase."I'm still in the arena," she said an apparent riposte to a Democratic rival, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Like Clinton, Edwards voted to authorize the invasion, but he has become a staunch war critic since leaving the Senate in 2004.
"It's very easy to go around and say, 'Let's end the war,'" Clinton added. "If we had a Democratic president we would end the war."
Her toughest question came in Berlin, a struggling mill town in northern New Hampshire.
Roger Tilton, 46, a financial adviser from Nashua, N.H., told Clinton that unless she recanted her vote, he was not in the mood to listen to her other policy ideas.
"I want to know if right here, right now, once and for all and without nuance, you can say that war authorization was a mistake," Tilton said. "I, and I think a lot of other primary voters until we hear you say it, we're not going to hear all the other great things you are saying."
In response, Clinton repeated her assertion that "knowing what we know now, I would never have voted for it," and said voters would have to decide for themselves whether her position was acceptable.
"The mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress," Clinton said to loud applause.
Does she really expect us to believe that she was misled by the Bush/Cheney administration, and she actually thought Iraq was a danger to us, with its supposed WMDs?
Also, she says "If we had a Democratic president we would end the war." I wasn't aware that the Constitution had been changed so that we now elect a dictator for four years and Congress has no say over any of his decisions. The Democratic party has a slim majority (counting Lieberman) in the Senate, and a larger majority in the House than the GOP had before November. A majority of Americans support a withdrawal from Iraq within the next year. If we're going to have to wait for a new President to withdraw, what's the point of pretentding to be a republic? Shouldn't we use all of the money we spend on the huge Congressional apparatus on some better use?
I've been a Democrat for 25 years but I will not vote for Hillary, ever even if my party nominates her. She and her Democratic Leadership Committee brand are against everything the Democrats are supposed to stand for. She's been backing the Iraq war for many years and helped it to expand, she wants war against Syria and Iran, her foreign policy in general is arrogant and aggressive.
And then at home, rather than standing with workers and unions, she supports corporate powers over workers and helping them send even more jobs overseas, while going so far as to support an amendment to frustrate Americans' free speech in the ridiculous name of "opposing flag desecration."
If we allow someone like this to represent our party, we ruin everything our party stands for. I'd rather find a good 3rd party to support than Hillary in any case. If it allows somebody like Giuliani to win in 2008, so what? The Democrats still control Congress and can guard against any meanderings by a moderate Repub, and besides, after 12 years of GOP foul-ups, 2012 would be our best chance in a long while to elect someone who really stands up for us into office.
Interesting. It's the old "If I can't have totally purity, then I'll stick beans up my nose and look self-righeously betrayed while others actually make this soicety work" brand of liberalism that will become increasingly irrelevant in the 21st century.
Wow, Craig. Did you type that all by yourself? I wasn't aware that arguing for a republic was outdated liberalism.
I can't fault Hillary over this single-issue issue. A LOT of people listened to the president in 2003-- if I hadn't been in art school at the time, I could've done the same. I can't say I ever bought the WMD/Iraq = Al-Quaida argument, and I never agreed with anything the Project for a New American Century came up with. But nevertheless, a -lot- of people listened to the president.
There will not be peace in the Middle East in our lifetime, with the borders cut how they presently are. There is no Democracy, no Enlightenment, and no Age of Reason in the lands east of Jerusalem. At its most basest level there is the West, there is the State, and there is Islam. Most people over there can agree on nationalism, maybe half of them over religion... and the West is becoming a rapid, rapid minority that flees on the heels of refugee migration.
The war was a terrible idea in hindsight, with decades of repercussions we can't yet understand. But alas, even Bill Clinton is on record for following the president's logic before the war. I'm not pro-Hillary and I have no idea who Obama is, which is sad because I'm not voting Republican. But can we at least look at the situation with a forward-looking eye, rather than just be a nation of "I told-you-so's!" when it comes to politics?
---------
Nate, if Hillary Clinton believed that crap when the rest of the world knew it was bad intelligence, why should we give her a promotion? This war is the biggest mistake the USA has ever made. No person who has a position other than ending it right now and figuring out how to help Iraq recover from the damage we caused has a right to any sane person's vote.
While we're on this subject, can someone point me to some reason to actually vote for her? She voted for the Iraq War, the PATRIOT Act, approves of our and Israel's use of cluster bombs, is against gay marriage, is against any public funding of abortion, etc. Why does anyone think she should become president?
It's remotely fascinating that this senatorial position she so desperately ran to the state of NY to obtain is the very thing that puts her at odds with the very next step she planned on taking....
It's a damned shame Mark Warner isn't running.