The Duped Democrats
Richard Cohen makes a fair point:
So I do not condemn Clinton and other Democratic presidential candidates -- Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and John Edwards -- for voting for the war because I would have done the same. I fault them, though, for passing the blame to Bush as the guy who misled them.
In hindsight, of course, everyone conveniently sees reasons -- which were apparent to no intelligence agency on earth at the time -- to question whether Saddam actually had WMD. But by arguing that, as senators, they were simply duped by a fiendishly deceptive, manipulative president (and haven't we been told all these years that the President is dumb and inarticulate?), the senators named above disqualify themselves for higher office.
After all, it doesn't work that way. What are they going to tell us in a few years: Sorry, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fooled us into thinking that he didn't have nuclear weapons. Oops, looks like Kim Jung Il went ahead and developed nukes even when he promised he wouldn't (come to think of it, that's happened to one Clinton Administration already).
Hillary Clinton deserves special blame for taking this tack. Her husband, too, believed that Saddam had WMD. She took a tough stance on the war not only for that reason, but because she knew it was necessary to be taken seriously as a female presidential candidate.
And it doesn't speak well either for her intelligence or integrity when she claims that another man just took shameless advantage of her little 'ole trusting self.
So I do not condemn Clinton and other Democratic presidential candidates -- Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and John Edwards -- for voting for the war because I would have done the same. I fault them, though, for passing the blame to Bush as the guy who misled them.
In hindsight, of course, everyone conveniently sees reasons -- which were apparent to no intelligence agency on earth at the time -- to question whether Saddam actually had WMD. But by arguing that, as senators, they were simply duped by a fiendishly deceptive, manipulative president (and haven't we been told all these years that the President is dumb and inarticulate?), the senators named above disqualify themselves for higher office.
After all, it doesn't work that way. What are they going to tell us in a few years: Sorry, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fooled us into thinking that he didn't have nuclear weapons. Oops, looks like Kim Jung Il went ahead and developed nukes even when he promised he wouldn't (come to think of it, that's happened to one Clinton Administration already).
Hillary Clinton deserves special blame for taking this tack. Her husband, too, believed that Saddam had WMD. She took a tough stance on the war not only for that reason, but because she knew it was necessary to be taken seriously as a female presidential candidate.
And it doesn't speak well either for her intelligence or integrity when she claims that another man just took shameless advantage of her little 'ole trusting self.
posted by LadybugUSA at 8:25 AM
2 Comments:
First off Carol Happy Birthday! Second the problem I have with Hillary Clinton is that like most of those in the Bush administration they did not read Charles Tripp's book "A History of Iraq" (Cambridge, 2000). I know for a fact that her husband did and had several discussions with the scholar of the region after recieving the famed letter from the Project for a New American Century signed by Abrams, Wolfowitz, Cheney Kristol et al.
In that vein I agree none of those democrats have a leg to stand on as everyone knew from the summer of 2002 on that Bush was going to strike Iraq and that Iraq was at the time the only target. For the reason for all of this ask Henry Kissinger or just read the "salted peanuts memo" to know why more troops are going to Iraq and none are coming home.
President Ahmadinejad's real views are summarized on this website: ahmadinejadquotes.blogspot.com
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