How Quickly They Forget

Robert Scheer reminds us:

[Clinton's] supporters have accepted [her] refusal to repudiate her vote to authorize the war, an ignominious moment she shares with other Democrats, including presidential candidate John Edwards, who at least has made a point of regretting it. It was a vote that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, 3,940 U.S. service members—five more on Monday—and a debt in the trillions of dollars that will prevent the funding of needed domestic programs that Clinton claims to support. And it doesn’t end with Iraq. Clinton has been equally hawkish toward Iran and, in a Margaret Thatcher-like moment, even attacked Obama for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons against Osama bin Laden.

Read the whole thing.

The Politics of Parsing

Poor Reasoning to Stay in Iraq

Reason Magazine lives up to it's name:

Whatever its merits as a cost-minimizing tactic in retailing, "you break it, you own it" isn't bad as a cautionary principle in foreign affairs. But as a plan for what to do after you've ignored the warning, it's worse than useless. As Gen. David Petraeus' recent congressional testimony confirmed, the reason not to go in has become the rationale for staying indefinitely.

Read the entire, short piece.

John Hodgman's Eight Keys To Success

Just Like a Stroll in an Indiana Farmer's Market

John McCain's little stroll through an Iraqi marketplace has got to be the Mother of all unnatural, ridiculously staged photo ops. The area, having been swept and secured the day before, then seeded with rooftop snipers and surrounded by more than 100 armed U.S. soldiers, the Senator would nevertheless have you believe that it was, as Rep. Mike Pence (one of McCain's three cohorts in this shameless little charade) put it, "like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime".

These Republican hacks are either deranged, stupid as a small soapdish, or cynical beyond description. I personally believe it is an unholy combination of all three. In any case, it is manifest evidence of the extent to which they think the American public, the Iraqi populace and the world community are entirely brainless and gullible.

As the old saying goes -- "Don't piss on me and then tell me it's only raining."

Take Off a Little More Shine

The picture of Obama is becoming a bit clearer -- if duller and darker -- as time goes on. This from the AP wires:

Two leading congressional Democrats yesterday said their party would have little realistic choice but to fund U.S. forces in Iraq without withdrawal timelines if President Bush vetoes a war-spending bill as promised.

"I think that nobody wants to play chicken with our troops on the ground," said Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. "Obviously we're constrained by the fact that a commander in chief who also has veto power has the option of ignoring that position," Mr. Obama, a 2008 presidential contender, said in an interview with the Associated Press.

Compare and contrast with this statement from Reid and Feingold regarding their newly introduced bill calling for a defunding of the war and a timeline certain.

U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced today that they are introducing legislation that will effectively end the current military mission in Iraq and begin the redeployment of U.S. forces. The bill requires the President to begin safely redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq 120 days from enactment, as required by the emergency supplemental spending bill the Senate passed last week. The bill ends funding for the war, with three narrow exceptions, effective March 31, 2008.

“Congress has a responsibility to end a war that is opposed by the American people and is undermining our national security." Feingold said. "By ending funding for the President’s failed Iraq policy, our bill requires the President to safely redeploy our troops from Iraq.”

Should Obama be the Democrat leading us out of this war rather than giving up and giving in to Bush's threatened veto?

FAQ on Iraq

It has always struck me that the press and the public have for the most part settled for Bush's simplistic "They hate us for our freedoms" explanation for the causes of Islamic terrorism. If it's not Bush giving the answers, then it's other Republicans, Democrats or American white men in general. In other words, just about the least qualified people on Earth to answer the question. If you really want an accurate answer, ask some Islamic terrorists. (The same goes for asking partisan hacks why people hate Bush)

So it's about time that somebody put forth the basic facts about what is really going on regarding the nature of the insurgency in Iraq. The title says it best -- The Iraq Insurgency for Beginners. Read it and be educated beyond and above the filter of the uninformed, biased and mendacious politicians, military and government officials.

Hillary's Fantasy Speech

Gary Kamiya over at Salon has penned a wonderful speech that Hillary Clinton might give in a perfect world. In this perfect world, she would be perfectly in tune with her Democratic base as well as with most Independents and even many Republicans. The fact that she never would, and genetically never could, even come close to delivering this speech, is only an indication of how far removed from the truth is the deception she has been living... how far from being honest with her constituents and the electorate she has been. Here is a little taste:

Until now, I have been saying, "If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have voted for it." That is a pathetic evasion. So let me say it clearly and forthrightly. I was wrong to vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq. Like most of my blue-state Democratic colleagues, I voted for the war out of cowardice, for purely self-serving political reasons. I didn't want to appear "soft on terrorism." I knew I was giving an incompetent president surrounded by ideologues with dubious motivations carte blanche to launch an unjustified and incredibly risky war. And I did it to save my own political skin.

Moreover, I knew I was wrong even as I did it. It was the greatest mistake of my life, and I will never stop regretting it. I will feel to my last breath that I bear some share of responsibility for an unjustified war that has become America's greatest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam, and has needlessly cost the lives of more than 3,000 American troops and as many as 700,000 Iraqis.

[snip]

For far too long I have been a follower, not a leader, timidly shaping my views to correspond to some imagined political center, some vague sense of a "silent majority." It's the same gutless deference to "Middle America" that caused the media to cave in to Bush's war. Well, I've decided it's time to lead, not follow. The truth is, Middle America is more sensible, and conservative in the traditional sense, than we give it credit for. And it's waiting for someone to tell it the truth.

There are many more big and juicy truths, facts and insights that we will never hear from the mouth of the Senator from New York, even though this knowledge, we sense, must exist in her mind to a great degree. Read the entire thing. It's an eye opener.

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.

9/11 Made Hillary Vote for Iraq War

From an interview with The Associated Press only last month:

Attention focused on Iraq and her vote to authorize the use of force ahead of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. Presidential rivals such as former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards now say the vote in support was a mistake.

"There are no do-overs in life," Clinton said. She says Congress received bad information going into the vote and that she would have voted differently given what she knows now.

"As a senator from New York, I lived through 9/11 and I am still dealing with the aftereffects," Clinton said. "I may have a slightly different take on this from some of the other people who will be coming through here."

So, what is her point? That she bought into the paranoid neocon notion that Iraq was connected to 9/11 somehow?