Oliver Willis

As anyone who has followed this election for about five minutes realizes, this primary process is essentially over. Sen. Clinton has lost and it seems like she’s the last to know. That said, these kinds of comments about her vote in favor of the Iraq War underline why she has a fundamental flaw were she to be the nominee.

“I made a considered judgment, I didn’t make a speech, I made a decision and it was a decision based on my best assessment on what would be in the interest of our country at that very uncertain time.”

Clinton said that historians will judge if her decision was the right one, but she reminded voters that Obama’s voting record on the war is not very different than hers.

You made a “considered judgment” that was wrong. You spent eight years as first lady, and in your first six years in the U.S. senate on the most important issue of that entire tenure, you made the wrong vote. If her actual quote really does cite the judgement of historians about her vote in favor of the Iraq War, she’ll be echoing another famous Iraq War proponent: George W. Bush. Bush too cites that only historians of the future will eventually judge him rightly or wrongly for the Iraq War. It’s that sort of jackassery that has led him to be a 30% approval president (and that’s being generous). And Sen. Clinton sounds just like him. She refuses to this day to acknowledge her vote in favor of the war was stupid, heck she’s done all sorts of verbal gymnastics to ineffectively say that the vote for the war wasn’t a vote for war. That’s a Jedi mind-trick that Obi Wan couldn’t even pull off.

Furthermore, Clinton begins to play fast and loose with the truth like she did with the now infamous phony Tuzla sniper story and gives out this whopper:

“I started criticizing the war in Iraq before he did. So, I’m well aware that his entire campaign is premised on a speech he gave in 2002 and I give him credit for making that speech. But that was not a decision.”

This is simply untrue. It is patently false. It is a lie. At the time Sen. Obama was running for his seat and criticizing the war before it even began, Sen. Clinton was lining up with the rest of the senate to burnish her national security credentials and vote for the war in Iraq. Certainly she followed public opinion and began critiquing the war’s execution and issues like body armor shortages - but before the guns started shooting - when it mattered most - before, as Sen. Obama put it, our country was driven in to the ditch that is the Iraq War, she was not a critic.

She was pushing the accelerator.

The reason why this would be so troubling and a drag on the party if she was the nominee is that her stance on the war makes John Kerry in 2004 sound as clear as a bell. This is a woman who is for or against the war depending on the dossier that Mark Penn brings her in the morning (after he gets off of his Colombian flight). Just a while back she was one of the people slamming a timetable for redeployment from Iraq. Now she’s in favor of it. She criticized David Petraeus, then a few weeks later complimented him.

Any day now I expect her to distill her position on the war to something like: “I was for it before I was against it, then I was for it again… I think. Mark, what do I think?”

Many of us spoke against the war when the entire media was for it. We saw the folly of this incursion into a hostile foreign nation while the entire foreign policy establishment thought it was a good deal. We realized that a war of occupation in Iraq would weaken America at the same time the Democratic party abandoned its long history of smart power by lining up to give George Bush the blank check to wage this war.

Thousands of lives and casualties later, Sen. Clinton still does not truly see the folly of her vote for the war in 2002 and goes so far as to lie about it.

At 3AM the only phone call she should be getting is a wrong number.

UPDATE: In Oregon, Clinton Makes False Claim About Her Iraq Record Vs. Obama’s

It’s an odd way to measure opposition to the war — comparing who gave the first criticism of the war in Iraq starting in January 2005, ignoring Obama’s opposition to the war throughout 2003 and 2004.

But even if one were to employ this “Start Counting in January 2005″ measurement, Clinton did not criticize the war in Iraq first.

Scrambling to support their boss’s claim, Clinton campaign officials pointed to a paper statement Clinton issued on Jan. 26, 2005, explaining her vote to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State.

“The Administration and Defense Department’s Iraq policy has been, by any reasonable measure, riddled with errors, misstatements and misjudgments,” the January 2005 Clinton statement said. “From the beginning of the Iraqi war, we were inadequately prepared for the aftermath of the invasion with too few troops and an inadequate plan to stabilize Iraq.”

But Obama offered criticisms of the war in Iraq eight days before that, directly to Rice, in his very first meeting as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Jan. 18.

Obama pushed Rice on her answers to previous questioners regarding the effectiveness of Iraqi troops, and he criticized the administration for conveying a never-ending commitment to a US troop presence in Iraq.

Sen. Clinton: Stop lying. Stop.

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