Clinton supporters have yet to address a fundamental problem with their candidate: why should Democrats again nominate a candidate who voted the wrong way as George W. Bush prepared to launch his catastrophic war in Iraq?
Some of the real problems with Hillary Clinton become clear from Lincoln Chafee’s new book due to appear soon. Rhode Island’s former Senator makes clear how weakly Democratic Senators behaved. They knew the evidence presented by the Bush administration was garbage (my word not Chafee’s) but they were too afraid to act.
From the Providence Journal:
The book has some through-the-looking-glass scenes; one in particular reads like Hunter S. Thompson sans drugs. As Mr. Bush pressed insistently for war, Chafee requested a meeting with CIA brass to examine the evidence against Saddam Hussein’s regime. “Sooner or later, I have to vote on this war, show me everything you have,” Chafee requests of the CIA.
“What they had, I discovered as the meeting stretched into an hour, was next to nothing,” recalls Chafee. “They showed me what they had with little comment and no enthusiasm. Someone handed me one of the infamous aluminum tubes, the kind we were told Saddam was using to enrich weapons-grade uranium while plotting mushroom clouds over America, the ‘smoking gun’ that Condoleezza Rice warned about.
“I looked at the aluminum tube, looked at the analysts and thought, I can go buy one of these at Adler’s Hardware,” the Providence hardware emporium, writes Chafee.
“Few members of Congress were willing to stand up to the schoolyard tough [Mr. Bush] and in the early morning hours of Oct. 11, 2002, weeks before the crucial midterm elections, he bullied them into declaring Saddam an imminent threat.”
http://www.projo.com/news/cont…
Senators like Clinton and Kerry may have voted to let Bush go forward for war for several reasons, but in the end this was a vote based on fear and politics. Kerry and Edwards at least had the candor to fess up in some fashion, but Hillary Clinton never really has. Given her track record there is no reason to take anything she says about policy in Iraq very seriously. She failed on health care in the 90s, but says she has learned. She failed on Iraq, but says she has learned. Why should we let her fail again, so that she can continue to learn at our expense? “Oops…I did it again.”
In advance request to Clinton supporters: I expect that some of you will reply by attacking Obama, but no such attack would amount to a justification for Senator Clinton’s vote on Iraq.
It’s the economy, .
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p>On Tuesday, vote smart, not cute.