Hillary Can Keep Her Damn Apology

From today's New York Times:

In the end, she settled on language that was similar to Senator John Kerry’s when he was the Democratic nominee in 2004: that if she had known in 2002 what she knows now about Iraqi weaponry, she would never have voted for the Senate resolution authorizing force.

Yet antiwar anger has festered, and yesterday morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather than make an apology she did not believe in.

I myself have no burning desire to hear Hillary apologize for her Iraq vote. She’s had a good four years to do so and she hasn’t yet. It’s far too late now. If it must be forced out of her mouth at this point, it will not have come from her heart. It will just be another political calculation. It will be worthless for those of us who seek leadership, principle and authenticity.

Her Kerryesque "If I knew then" answer to the question of whether her vote as a mistake is inane and grating. There were millions of us who opposed this war from the very beginning, who could see that the administration was lying about WMD, that it was a diversion from going after bin Laden, that it was just a terrible idea to invade and occupy a major nation in the middle of the Muslim Middle East as a response to 9/11, and that it was the wrong way to deal with extremist Islamic terrorism. We protested in the streets and we called and faxed our representatives urging them not to write a blank check for Bush and Cheney -- and they ignored us.

Moreover, many of us were well aware of the "Bush Doctrine" of military preemption, unilateral action, world dominance and hegemony, which he introduced in his commencement speech to the graduating class of West Point on June 1, 2002 and was formally set forth in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, published on September 20, 2002, well in advance of the Senate's October 11 vote giving Bush his authority to use force against Iraq.

How much warning does a U.S. Senator need? Was Hillary not paying as close attention as we were? When a man (a lying, moron of a man) is threatening to shoot somebody, and then you give him a gun and a license, should you then be surprised when he kills somebody?

Knowing what we all knew then, we all showed better judgment than Hillary Clinton.