Why

Why did she vote for Bush’s war? Clinton says she didn’t know then what she knows now. Does anybody believe this? Twenty-three other Senators knew something then, and they voted against the war. Plenty of us outside of the Senate Club said Bush’s war would be: a mistake, illegal, imperialist, nothing to do with 9/11, a disaster in the making, and a blood-bath to come. So what the hell didn’t she know? Where were her vaunted smarts, competence, & experience when it really meant something? Tens of thousands killed, a tab in the trillions, a generation maimed, bloated war-profiteering, a nation dismembered, a region made more instable, unprecedented Presidential power, and no end in sight. And she is one of the responsible ones.

Does anyone really doubt that she voted yes because she was thinking of her political career, her viability, her run for President, and little else? The war was, after all, supposed to be quick and easy, relatively painless (for “our” boys and girls); a yes vote was also supposed to be quick and easy, certainly painless in the face of the criminal cries of “treason” by the war-party. And the benefits of voting with Bush? It would show she was strong on national defense, a patriot, someone with the toughness to commit other people’s children to war. She was playing by Republican rules, taking the bait hook, line, and sinker. In her otherwise cautious Senate career, Clinton has more than proven that she will support the Pentagon’s grotesquely warping budget and otherwise show she has pro-military balls; a quick little war would be the ne plus ultra of the Clinton tradition of “triangulation,” or absorbing the right’s psychosis as its own, ever dragging the “moderate” into the depths.