BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL AID TABLE
IN PREPARATION FOR THE BIG DAY IN IOWA THIS MONDAY, CRANKY CLINTON AND HER SUPPORTERS GATHERED IN A LARGE WOODED AREA JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT AND CREATED A SMALL CLEARING WHERE THEY BURNED AT THE STAKE A YOUNG VIRGIN TO ENSURE THAT CRANKY COULD CINCH THE NOMINATION THIS GO ROUND.
AFTERWARDS, CRANKY DEVOURED THE HEARTS OF 2 SMALL CHILDREN WHILE BUSYING HERSELF MAKING A VOO DOO DOLL OF BERNIE SANDERS.
"IT'S ALL PART OF THE PROCESS," CRANKY EXPLAINED.
All these years later, why are any US troops in Iraq?
There is no strategy, there is no logic, there is only continued death and destruction.
Which is why it does matter that Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War.
In 2002, she was a US Senator and she chose to vote for the Iraq War.
She chose to support it for years after.
It's only in 2008 that she can call it a 'mistake' publicly and then, this week, she insisted it was a 'mistake' only because Bully Boy Bush had prosecuted the war wrongly.
She's a liar.
As a US Senator, as a First Lady, as a Secretary of State, she's a liar.
But she thinks she deserves the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
Other are less likely to agree. Take Angela Ross of Eugene, Oregon who writes a letter to the editor of THE REGISTER GUARD explaining:
There is no strategy, there is no logic, there is only continued death and destruction.
Which is why it does matter that Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War.
In 2002, she was a US Senator and she chose to vote for the Iraq War.
She chose to support it for years after.
It's only in 2008 that she can call it a 'mistake' publicly and then, this week, she insisted it was a 'mistake' only because Bully Boy Bush had prosecuted the war wrongly.
She's a liar.
As a US Senator, as a First Lady, as a Secretary of State, she's a liar.
But she thinks she deserves the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
Other are less likely to agree. Take Angela Ross of Eugene, Oregon who writes a letter to the editor of THE REGISTER GUARD explaining:
Many of my women friends favor electing Hillary Clinton as our next president because she’s a woman, but I can’t base my vote on gender.
Because Clinton voted to support the Iraq war while in the U.S. Senate, I can’t in good conscience vote for her for president. If she’d argued against invading Iraq (as Sen. Bernie Sanders did), it would have shown leadership. Instead, she went along with the Bush-Cheney program.
[. . .]
I not only will vote for Sanders, I’ll also work hard participating in the democratic process his campaign engenders. He has 21st century ideas, whereas the ideas of Clinton and other establishment figures are from the 20th century.
Hillary may have foreign policy experience, but when push came to shove, she showed an extreme lack of judgment on the most important foreign policy decision in a generation. As in 2008 when she was running against Obama, it casts serious doubt on whether she's the Democrats' best presidential nominee.
Hillary voted for the Iraq War either out of rank political opportunism, because as a prospective presidential candidate, she feared that an anti-war vote would make her look weak. If so, she voted to send thousands to their deaths to further her political career.
Or she voted for the war out of a sincere belief in the benefits of American military intervention in the Middle East and the good that could come from regime change. If so, her beliefs showed an extreme lack of foreign policy judgment.
I'm not sure which is worse: voting for a needless and destructive war out of political opportunism or out of poor judgment. In either event, the Iraq War vote remains a big black mark on Hillary's claim that her foreign policy experience makes her the best choice to be Commander in Chief on Day 1.
Hillary voted for the Iraq War either out of rank political opportunism, because as a prospective presidential candidate, she feared that an anti-war vote would make her look weak. If so, she voted to send thousands to their deaths to further her political career.
Or she voted for the war out of a sincere belief in the benefits of American military intervention in the Middle East and the good that could come from regime change. If so, her beliefs showed an extreme lack of foreign policy judgment.
I'm not sure which is worse: voting for a needless and destructive war out of political opportunism or out of poor judgment. In either event, the Iraq War vote remains a big black mark on Hillary's claim that her foreign policy experience makes her the best choice to be Commander in Chief on Day 1.
Academy Award winning actress Susan Sarandon spoke out against the Iraq War. While Hillary used support of the Iraq War to increase her own profile, Susan opposed the war and was verbally attacked for that. She saw a charity event cancelled because she supported peace.
As Gregory Favre (POYNTER) explained March 28, 2003:
This week, the folks at United Way of Tampa Bay, in their infinite lack of wisdom, canceled an event because the actor Susan Sarandon was to be the speaker. This decision was made the day after she flashed the peace sign during the Academy Awards telecast.
How dare she have an opinion, much less express it.
So the $75 a plate dinner was sacrificed. (In the interest of full disclosure, Sarandon's fee was being paid by the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by The Poynter Institute, my employer. And my boss, our dean, Karen Dunlap, was scheduled to interview her as part of the program.)
It had nothing to do with Sarandon's views, a United Way spokesperson said. It's just that her presence would have been divisive.
But isn't this kind of heavy-handed response to dissent happening all over this country? Just listen to the violence of the language aimed at those who may raise questions. Are we back in the '50s and '60s of the last century?
And it didn't end there. Roger Catlin (LOS ANGELES TIMES) reported the following month:
Last week, she and her partner, Tim Robbins, were told by Baseball Hall of Fame President Dale Petroskey, a former assistant press secretary to President Ronald Reagan, that he was canceling a 15th anniversary celebration of their film "Bull Durham." Petroskey said the couple's antiwar stance "ultimately could put our troops in even more danger." Earlier, Sarandon's appearance at a United Way event in Florida was canceled.
Hillary didn't just speak out for the war, she voted for it. Despite the fact that she was supposedly representing the state of New York which gave her no mandate to support the Iraq War.
She voted for in direct opposition of the will of the citizens she represented.
So she attacked democracy and logic to embrace illegal war.
In an attempt to bury the issue before her planned run for the 2016 Democratic Party's presidential nomination, Hillary 'addressed' the issue in her ghost-written, poor selling book entitled HARD CHOICES. Lesley Clark (MCCLATCHY NEWS) noted in 2014:
Democrats such as Clinton believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat, a belief they said was fed by their own research beyond the word of the Bush White House, all of which later proved to be wrong.
Clinton said in the book that she’d voted to authorize war “after weighing the evidence and seeking as many opinions as I could inside and outside our government, Democrats and Republicans alike.”
But as Stephen Zunes (FPIF) pointed out earlier this week:
“Her vote was simply a mistake.”
While few Clinton supporters are still willing to argue her support for the war was a good thing, many try to minimize its significance by referring to it as simply a “mistake.” But while it may have been a terrible decision, it was neither an accident nor an aberration from Clinton’s generally hawkish worldview.
It would have been a “mistake” if Hillary Clinton had pushed the “aye” button when she meant to push the “nay” button. In fact, her decision — by her own admission — was quite conscious.
The October 2002 war resolution on Iraq wasn’t like the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing military force in Vietnam, which was quickly passed as an emergency request by President Lyndon Johnson when there was no time for reflection and debate. By contrast, at the time of the Iraq War authorization, there had been months of public debate on the matter. Clinton had plenty of time to investigate the administration’s claims that Iraq was a threat, as well as to consider the likely consequences of a U.S. invasion.
Also unlike the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which was disingenuously presented as an authorization to retaliate for an alleged attack on U.S. ships, members of Congress recognized that the Iraq resolution authorized a full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation and a subsequent military occupation. Clinton had met with scores of constituents, arms control analysts, and Middle East scholars who informed her that the war was unnecessary, illegal, and would likely end in disaster.
But she decided to support going to war anyway. She even rejected the advice of fellow Democratic senator Bob Graham that she read the full National Intelligence Estimate, which would have further challenged some of the Bush administration’s claims justifying the war.
It was not, therefore, simply a “mistake,” or a momentary lapse of judgment. Indeed, in her own words, she cast her vote “with conviction.”
She made a decision and it wasn't based on the will of the citizens, it wasn't based on the law, it wasn't based on facts. She made a decision that started the Iraq War and all the destruction that followed -- all the destruction that continues.
RECOMMENDED: "Iraq snapshot"
