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Stop Blaming Hillary for Iraq

Stop Blaming Hillary for Iraq

I was on a thread in my Facebook political group, Open Fire, arguing with hardcore liberals who still blame Hillary Clinton for the Iraq War because of her vote for the 2002 Iraq War Resolution. But when I asked them these questions, I got nothing back:

1) Who did you vote for in 2004? If you voted for Sen. John Kerry and Sen. John Edwards, you voted for two of the senators who voted with Hillary for the War Resolution. So why was it okay to support them for the White House but not her?

2) Who did you vote for in 2008 and 2012? If you voted for the Obama-Biden ticket, you’re on record with a third and fourth vote for a Senator (Joe Biden) who voted for the war. Why was it okay to vote for Biden twice but not her?

3) But maybe John Kerry wasn’t your first choice in ’04. Maybe you liked Rep. Dick Gephardt. There’s another liberal in congress who voted for the Iraq War Resolution, yet many liberal Democrats supported his presidential quest without guilt.

4) Hey, I see you live in California. I bet that means you’ve voted for Diane Feinstein a few times. That’s a few more votes under your belt for a senator who voted for the War Resolution.

5) How do you feel about liberal icon Sen. Tom Harkin? Or Tom Daschle? Jay Rockefeller? Chris Dodd? Max Cleland? Chuck Schumer? Do you think they are all “neocon war hawks”? Because they all voted the same way as Hillary on Iraq: FOR.

How about Reps. Patrick Kennedy? Jean Carnahan? Ed Markey? Adam Schiff? Henry Waxman? Brad Sherman? Harold Ford? They all voted for the Resolution, too.

If those are your definitions of neocons and hawks, I think you’d better look up those words again. Or, as the line from The Princess Bride goes,

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

6) How is it that 29 Democratic senators and 82 Democratic representatives all voted for the 2002 Iraq War Resolution, but you are still blaming it all on Hillary Clinton, as if she’s the only one? Scapegoat much?

Sure, it would’ve been nice if Clinton had been on the “against” side with Teddy Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Dick Durbin and 20 other Dem. senators. But she was a senator from NY voting one year after 9/11. And yes, there were political calculations involved. However, it’s only one vote and not the defining action of her career.

If you can’t get over that one vote, then you can’t forgive JFK for the Bay of Pigs or Bobby Kennedy for working for Joe McCarthy. And you can’t forgive Barack Obama for the Afghan surge.
hvtxo6mAnd when you compare Clinton’s 3,000 word senate floor speech explaining her vote on the Resolution to Donald Trump’s oh-so-statesman-like, “Yeahhh…. I guess so…” answer to Howard Stern, it’s clear that one of them thought it through with the best information she had at her disposal, and the other was winging it on the fly, like a pickup line in a SoHo nightclub. Which is probably as close to foreign affairs as he ever got.

As someone once said, even the best NFL players get blood stains and grass stains on their uniforms, and they sometimes make mistakes on the field and get beat up in the process. The only people with perfectly clean jerseys are the guys who’ve been standing on the sidelines.

Kevin Kelton is the co-host of the “A More Perfect Union” podcast and founder of the Facebook political debate group, Open Fire.

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3 comments on Stop Blaming Hillary for Iraq

  1. Kevin Kelton, Bravo and too, AMEN ! YES, BLEEDING AMEN ! YES 🙂 THANK YOU FOR SURE ! 🙂

  2. Chase Lemke says:

    Hey folks, my name is Chase and I’m a college student from Minnesota who defines himself as a somewhat left-of-center Independent. I picked up this podcast last fall and it’s become my favorite in a sizable list of political podcasts. I wanted to throw a question to any of you that feel like chiming in. Some political pods (538 and NPR Political, if memory serves) had their hosts list the questions that they would put forth if they had the lead prompt at the debate next Monday. What would you folks submit, if afforded that opportunity? For me, it’d be “Mr. Trump, on Monday you praised Israel’s use of profiling to take in suspicious-looking people. Last Wednesday, you praised and called for the use of a stop-and-frisk policy like New York used to implement, despite a 2013 federal court striking down such practices as unconstitutional. Do you consider concerns about the legality and morality of visual profiling to be overblown political correctness?”

  3. Sandy says:

    I did not and would NEVER vote for any of the above or anyone similar. And YES, they are ALL neocon war hawks.

    In fact , neocon war hawks dominate the Democratic Party, which is as violent and corrupt as the Republican Party.

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