Senator Clinton's Shifting Views On Iraq...

...Or the "I was for the war before I was against it" routine.

In the news today:

“This was his decision to go to war with an ill-conceived plan and an incompetently executed strategy,” the Democratic senator from New York said her in [sic] initial presidential campaign swing through Iowa.

"We expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office" in January 2009, the former first lady said.

Emphasis mine. I'll pass over the last statement - Mrs. Clinton does not want to have to deal with the war when (as she hopes) she takes office in January 2009. Note that she said that the decision was his to make. She states elsewhere

"'This is not a vote for pre-emptive war.' I said that on the floor of the Senate. I said that we should not go to war unless we have allies... If we knew then what we know now, there never would have been a vote. I never would have voted to give this president that authority."

Note that Senator Clinton said that we should have allies and that she was misled by the information provided by President Bush. As I have posted elsewhere, President Bush inherited his Iraq policy from President Clinton and since we know that Bill and Hillary were "two for the price of one", she most likely knew the same things that her husband did. If nothing else, she believe the same faulty intelligence that President Clinton gave to the American people

But let's take the YouTube Delorean (see video below) back to March 6, 2003 when Senator Clinton meets with a group called Code Pink just after voting to authorize President Bush to go to war with Iraq and just weeks before the Coalition's invasion.

First of all, I love their opening theme song!!! Senator Clinton enters at 1:41 into the video. Note how she wears BLUE to speak to the Code PINK group in 2003... And the spokes-lady talking at 4:00 in has Hillary's name spelled wrong on her shirt (Hilary)!

Now, compare Hillary's comments there regarding her research into the war (8:52-9:20) - stating that she voted as she did "after carefully reviewing the information and intelligence I had available, people whose opinions I trusted" with the current statements. This flies pretty squarely in the face against what the Senator is telling us today - that she was misled by one man and one man alone!

See also the question at 10:14 and 11:06 where Hillary is asked if the US should go in unilaterally. Hillary's answer begins at 11:15. Hillary is strong and doesn't give way to the disagreement by Code Pink. The question is basically "Whose responsibility is it to disarm Saddam?" Senator Clinton said (11:47) that

"I do not believe that, given the attitudes of many people in the world community today, that there would be a willingness to take on very difficult problems were it not for the United States' leadership. And I'm talking specifically about what had to be done in Bosnia and Kosovo where my husband could not get a Security Council resolution to save the Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing. And we did it alone as the United States , and we had to do it alone. It would have been far preferable if the Russians and others had agreed to do it through the United Nations. They would not."

At 14:30ish they started railing on the Senator as she was leaving!! Wow! - it's good to see how Senator Clinton was trying to distance herself from that group - she wouldn't even take one of their pink shirts. I will give her some credit for that!


Technorati: Hillary Clinton, Iraq

The Cheney Family on Hillary Clinton

From a Newsmax story, we have the following quotes:

[VP Dick] Cheney, asked in an interview on CNN whether Clinton would make a good president, replied, "No, I don't."

Why not? "Because she's a Democrat. I don't agree with her philosophically and from a policy standpoint."

I think that's one of my fundamental issues with Senator Clinton. But the Newsmax article also referenced a quote by Liz Cheney, the Vice President's daughter. That story can actually be found at The Union Leader. I like this quote in particular:

Anyone who has watched her remarkable trajectory can have no doubt that she'll do whatever it takes to win the Presidency. I wish she felt the same way about the war.

In fairness, Clinton, with her proposal for arbitrary caps on troop levels and hemming and hawing about her vote for the war resolution, has company on both sides of the aisle. Sen. Joseph Lieberman is the only national Democrat showing any courage on this issue. We Republicans -- with help from senators such as Chuck Hagel -- seem ready to race the Democrats to the bottom.

She then goes on to list some considerations for those who are wanting to cut and run.

This is what we here at Anybody Buy Hillary are about. We have nothing against the Senator personally. We just feel that she does not represent the direction we should take for this country.

Technorati: Hillary Clinton, CNN

I'm in. And I'm in to win.

Saturday, Hillary Clinton announce that she is definitely running for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008. The text of her statement can be found here. It's probably just a formality as she will likely beat out her opponents with ease. She's already possibly started to profile Barack Obama as a muslim - and this from the party of tolerance!

Of course, Senator Clinton's announcement doesn't surprise us here at ABH. We expect a torrent of "criticism" aimed at Senator Obama and John Edwards in the coming year and a half. Since there isn't really anything fundamentally different in the politics of the candidates, the race can't really be about the substantive differences. Senator Clinton is planning to highlight health insurance. If I were a betting man, I would bet that she will level her sights against John Edwards shenanigans as a lawyer and claim that is causing health care to skyrocket.

In other news, President Bush began to outline his plans for health care reform in his Saturday morning radio address. He believes the government should only provide free healthcare for those who are most in need of it. He believes that people at small businesses or who have to buy their own insurance should be able to get a tax break similar to those who work for larger companies (the insurance comes out pre-tax so this is very similar to a tax break since it lowers the income bracket).

Technorati: Hillary Clinton, Fox News