In two memos rich with disingenuousness, the Clinton campaign celebrates the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by attacking Obama for not opposing it enough and by announcing a "three-point plan" for getting out.
The attack is, basically, so what if Obama was right, he just gave a speech, and I visited 82 countries as First Lady!! The plan is, basically: Pull out some troops but leave enough behind to make sure nothing bad happens. Stabilize Iraq. Do regional diplomacy to get everyone to help us. Really creative stuff.
The amazing thing is that neither one of her big memos even acknowledges -- even in a phrase -- that she was one of the bright people who voted to authorize the invasion, and five years ago, on the very eve of the attack, in a meeting with anti-war activists, supported the invasion.
Not a single word of apology to the millions of New Yorkers in whose name she cast that vote and took those positions for failing to even read the intelligence estimates beforehand. Instead, she challenges Obama, who had the temerity to be right:
"While Senator Clinton has acted on the words she uses on the campaign trail, Senator Obama’s words aren’t backed by action. At the end of the day, the true test for a president is not the speeches he or she delivers - it’s whether he or she delivers on the speeches."
The hyppocrisy of this can not be pointed out often enough. If you're wrong about something and someone else is right, you should just keep quiet. Instead, she tries to cast the person who was right as ineffectual for not succeeding in reversing the effect of her action, immunizes herself through some kind of act of executive clemency, and then acts like she's the only one qualified to correct her own failure.
How exactly, we wonder, has she "acted" on her words? And what is the true test of a senator -- the memos she has her staff write to try to erase her votes and her history, or the votes she cast?
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Hillary attacks the Bush-McCain policy: "Don’t learn from your mistakes, repeat them." I guess it takes one to know one.
Less than six months ago, Hillary voted in favor of calling Iran's Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization. She defended that vote by saying that it did not give President Bush the authority to use military force against Iran, but this was her defense for voting for the Iraq war, saying that she believed the President would use diplomatic tactics before resorting to violence! (That statement is laughable on its own; everyone who remembers the public atmosphere at that time knows that it was a vote for war.) It has been five years and nearly four thousand American troops have paid the price for her authorization of the Iraq invasion, yet Senator Clinton clearly did not learn from her mistake.