Political Cowardice
Here’s what David Chalian at ABC’s news blog is reporting:
As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to assess a possible presidential candidacy and the contours of a Democratic nomination fight, she has taken another step away from her 2002 vote authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq by saying that she “wouldn’t have voted that way” if she knew everything she knows now.
Clinton has often been asked if she regrets her vote authorizing military action and she usually answers that question with an artful dodge, saying that she accepts responsibility for the vote and suggesting that if the Senate had all the information it has today (no WMD, troubled post-war military planning, etc. . .), there would never have been a vote on the Senate floor.
However, she has never gone as far as some of her potential rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination — who also voted for the war — and called her vote a mistake or declared that she would have cast her vote differently with all the facts presently available to her — until now.
This morning on NBC’s “Today” show, Sen. Clinton was asked about her 2002 vote and offered a slightly evolved answer. “Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn’t have been a vote,” she said in her usual refrain before adding, “and I certainly wouldn’t have voted that way.”
Does she really think that this is going to win her points with the anti-war Left? They already don’t trust her —and now she comes out with this?
By the way, it’s the anti-war Left that’s responsible for all of our problems in Iraq because they insist on misremembering the reasons why we fight and because they give aid and comfort to our enemies by playing up aberrations like Abu Ghraib. If the al-Qaedists and the insurgents didn’t have such a magnificent propaganda machine on the TV here every day and all day long, their terrorism wouldn’t have made such pessimists of the American People.
Don’t forget: the Tet Offensive was a disaster on the ground for the communists in Viet Nam. It was only a success here at home when the “Blame America” crowd absconded with the message and blunted our purpose.
