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?
