Either way, she made a judgment, and she will not be able to spend month after month explaining it away to voters with glib, lawyerly statements. The politics of personal destruction, should they actually visit the Clintons once more, will not take America’s mind off the politics of mass destruction in Iraq.
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As for the vote. The issue at hand for Hillary Clinton is whether or not she will admit was a mistake. Frank Rich slices and dices her arguments and forces her, unlike many others in her same boat- voted for it, are sorry now-this will haunt her. She will have to answer for it.
Frankly some of this might come from voters who are so tired of seeing lie after lie come out of the White House that they want someone who will diametrically the opposite of Bushes omstantly campainging, constantly spinning perpetual motion machine.
The issue is not that Mrs. Clinton voted for the war authorization in 2002 or that she refuses to call it a mistake in 2007. Those are footnotes. The larger issue is judgment, then and now. Take her most persistent current formulation on Iraq: "Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn’t have been a vote and I certainly wouldn’t have voted that way." It’s fair to ask: Knew what then? Not everyone was so easily misled by the White House’s manipulated intelligence and propaganda campaign. Some of her fellow leaders in Washington — not just Mr. Obama out in Illinois, not just Al Gore out of power — knew plenty in the fall of 2002. Why didn’t she?
So why will this follow her? Could it be that if those in the news community knew it was a lie and if we in the blogosphere knew it was a lie and the facts were there were many in the intelligence community who debunked the WMD claims, and if we knew it, and we followed the story then how could she be so misled?
Frank Rich hints at these questions, most of them I ask. How could some like me, a middle aged executive, read enough to know that the intelligence was stove- piped and it was a all a false casus beli, if I could figure this out, then why should I trust her to figure anything out ever again.
I will admit that she lost me with the flag burning amendment- wanting to make a symbol of freedom more important than actual freedom- calling on those old tire memes about dying for the flag making it holy-but she will have to come out and answer this.
As an aside, Mr Rich repeats a claim that I have seen covered here years back but have never actually seen make a huge topic.
It should be.
This is shocking.
Emphasis mine.
Just as the debacle on the gulf was a call to arms for NBC’s Brian Williams and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, so the former ABC anchor Bob Woodruff has returned from his own near-death experience in Iraq to champion wounded troops let down by their government. And not just at Walter Reed. His powerful ABC News special last week unearthed both a systemic national breakdown in veterans’ medical care and a cover-up. The Veterans Affairs Department keeps "two sets of books" — one telling the public that the official count of nonfatal battlefield casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan stands at 23,000, the other showing an actual patient count of 205,000. Why the discrepancy? A new Brownie — Jim Nicholson, the former Republican National Committee hack whom President Bush installed as veterans affairs secretary — tells Mr. Woodruff "a lot of them come in for dental problems."
Hope they are covering this on iraqcasultycount
But this is unbelievable. Not 23,000 wounded. But 205,000 wounded. That makes our battle casualties way worse than we have been hearing and I wonder if the voters will ever hear this as well.