it was always going to be an issue in his Senate campaign, so I find his point valid. the fact he made it early is incredible considering that at that time almost EVERYONE was in GWB's pocket. by 2004 things were already looking bad for Iraq, but in 2002 there was still the prevailing idea that it was going to be a breeze, that the mission would be accomplished in short order and we'd go back home as triumphant liberators.

When Senator Obama gave his anti War speech in 2002, over 70% of the people in Illinois were in favor of what George W. Bush wanted to do. Senator Obama went against where the overwhelming number of voters in Illinois stood at that time.

His anti war stand, at a time when a vast majority of his state and the nation were swept up in a tidal wave of war fever, makes Senator Obama A Profile in Judgment, Wisdom, and Courage.

Larry, you keep ranting and Hillary keeps dropping in the polls. Obama was right on Iraq. Hillary was wrong. That's going to defeat Hillary and it's driving you and Hillary nuts.

It's 3:00 am; a phone is ringing in the White House. It's Ahmed Chalabi with urgent information about Iran. He reaches an intern. The intern says "It's nobody baby", and hangs up.

It's 3:30 am; a phone is ringing in the White House. It's Ahmed Chalabi again with urgent information about Iran. This time he gets through to President Hillary Clinton.

It's 4:00 am; a phone is ringing in the Pentagon; it's Hillary Clinton authorizing CENTCOM to nuke Tehran.

It's 4:30 am; a phone is ringing in the White House. It's CENTCOM with the message "Mission accomplished, Madame President."

It's 5:00 am; a phone is ringing in the White House. It's the CIA with the information that the 3:30 call was a crank call.

It's 5:30 am; a phone is ringing at the Washington Post. It's Mark Penn saying that Clinton only meant to authorize nuking Tehran, but didn't intend for CENTCOM to actually nuke Tehran. He adds, "Iran doesn't count; it's a red state."

It's 6:00 am; a phone is ringing at the Obama household. It's Hillary Clinton with the message "I wish you had won.".

It's 7:00 am; a phone is ringing at the Obama household. It's America. America says, "We wish you had won too!"

thank you, balta 1701. that is exactly how i feel. my question to Senator Clinton has always been "if i knew, how could you NOT know?"

Larry has long been a proponent for Hillary's bid for president. He's made no attempt to hide this fact. What this post sounds like to me is damage control - damage control on all fronts.

Hillary stepped in it with that phone-call ad. Obama smacked her down good for it. We are heading into the weekend with a bruised Hillary and a confident Obama with the country having witnessed the entire exchange. This post just feels like the response to a situation where someone gets caught in a compromising position (one of their own making mind you) and the angry lashing out which follows such embarrassment.

The irony of course is that any - I repeat ANY - reference to the Iraq War makes Clinton look crummy. Period. No matter what other angle a person might be trying to get at. It's inconceivable why anyone in the Clinton camp would want to bring it up...ever. If anyone wants an example (beyond the vote for war of course) of Hillary Clinton showing poor judgement I'd say swinging around the Iraq stick and hitting herself in the face with it might be a place to start looking.

Many Democrats voted against the war including the two Senators and Congressman who represented me at the time. In particular, Paul Wellstone, who was up for reelection in 2002, had the courage to vote against the war.

But Hillary's vote is extra special because Hillary is making a claim to 35 years of experience and including the 8 years she spent in the White House. If all that experience and insider knowledge didn't guide her vote what did? I think we know what did - political expediency.

Unfortunately for Hillary, her plan run a general election campaign instead of a primary campaign is about to do her in -- I hope!

For me, it is the totality of Hillary's problems that has driven me away from her candidacy. Had she acknowledged later that it was a mistake, a la Edwards, I could have overlooked the original vote. To top that, she voted for the Iran authorization, knowing full well how this warmongering Bush is itching to start another fight. She can say all she wants that it was NOT an authorization to use force, but once bitten twice shy should have been the guiding principle when such enormous stakes are concerned.

I was at a July 2007 convention where Hillary was supposed to be the keynote speaker in Santa Clara, CA. She ditched at the last minute. Her televised appearance from New Orleans was really poor and ill received. Now her degenerating campaign is making me doubly sure that voting for Obama is the right thing. No human being is perfect, so we should not expect that from Obama. But Hillary has strayed far from the grassroots Democratic ideals that define the party (see the article in The Nation on how her team tried to shut out Dean and his 50-state strategy; she has also denigrated voters in many of the states she did not win). Her campaign has mismanaged the finances - there was a report of her $25,000 Las Vegas bill for ordering high end amenities during the Nevada caucuses. Her last minute whining about the delegates from Michigan and Florida, her threatening the state of Texas Democratic party for the caucus rules. The Texas caucus rules might be stupid, and deserve to be changed, but she should have raised the objections much earlier. Bill Clinton played by these rules twice earlier, so it is NOT as if she did not know.

I feel sad because had Obama not been in the field, I could visualize really being energized by the first real female candidate for POTUS! She can still come out of this a winner - not in the nomination race, but as a person of integrity and a leader of the Democratic party. Larry Kissel and his ilk don't seem to understand this and she is getting bad advice from people like him and Mark Penn and James Carville.

how naive I am. I had thought New York State, where I was born and raised, was one of the more liberal states in the US. I guess Hillary did not want to face the far right wing fanatics in Brooklyn. Or was it Buffalo? Suffolk? Nassau? Let's cut her some serious slack here.

In the interests of balance, I think Taylor Marsh should be extended an invitation to weigh in on this critical issue here at the Café.

Not Worth A Dime vs The Cure That's Worse Than The Disease

.

"The Obama campaign told CTV late Thursday night that no message was passed to the Canadian government that suggests that Obama does not mean what he says about opting out of NAFTA if it is not renegotiated.

However, the Obama camp did not respond to repeated questions from CTV on reports that a conversation on this matter was held between Obama's senior economic adviser -- Austan Goolsbee -- and the Canadian Consulate General in Chicago.

Earlier Thursday, the Obama campaign insisted that no conversations have taken place with any of its senior ranks and representatives of the Canadian government on the NAFTA issue. On Thursday night, CTV spoke with Goolsbee, but he refused to say whether he had such a conversation with the Canadian government office in Chicago. He also said he has been told to direct any questions to the campaign headquarters. ... .."

Hmmm

I'll be so glad when it's March 5 and this whole thing is over.

Well if it was merely a speech, hillary would be right. But then still in the midst of the senate race he debated Keyes about it on television, as well as had several live interviews about the consequences of the war BEFORE it began. He said the case had not been made for Iraq and it would be a strategic mistake to strike there, and now our military is stretched so thin that the recruiting age has been lowered as well as the academic standards for admission into the military, and they're now recruiting gays despite the DADT.

Funny how hillary bases her foreign policy on a speech she gave in beijing about women's rights. seems similar to what she's criticizing about obama. Hillary didnt even have a security clearance when she was in her husband's administration so she wasnt there in the most pressing moments of the adminstration, especially foreign policy-wise.

and it's so curious to me why she will not release the white house papers that show everything she ever did in the white house... maybe it will show how little experience she actually has.

i mean like that whole ireland thing... she had nothing to do with that..yet she claims she was some high level ambassador in that conflict. well ireland claims otherwise.. yet she continues to use this example as her foreign policy experience.

The former C.I.A. flunky, Larry Johnson still Can't Identify Anything. Too many years spent screwing pooches and fucking-up soup sandwiches morning, noon, and night will do that to loyal bureaucratic bootlickers. Larry Johnson simply can't grasp that the issue concerning BOTH Buffaloed Girl AND John McBomb in no way involves PROMOTING them for failure below and beneath the lowest of non-existent expectations, but rather concerns how much hot tar and how many feathers to dip them in before running them both out of town hung dangling upside down from a rail. I thought fuck-up-and-move-up went out with "The Best and the Brightest" in Vietnam, but I see it has returned with a vengeneance courtesy of "The Worst and the Dullest" who led America's foolish charge down into the twin Little Big Horns of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Again, for simple minds like Larry Johnson, the issue involves PUNISHMENT and NOT REWARD for incomparably gross negligence and malfeasance in office. Given that Buffaloed Girl and John McBomb do not have the integrity to atone for their crimes by ceremonially slitting open their own bellies, Samurai style, then voting against their shameless lust for higher office will just have to do.

Senator Obama may let us down in the future as Buffaloed Girl and John McBomb have in the past. That remains for us to see. He might not. Yet better the good that might possibly disappoint us than the bad that already has. Over twenty U.S. Senators and over one hundred U.S. Congressmen -- not to mention millions of us "liberal" persons worldwide -- easily saw through the lies and disinformation that Buffaloed Girl and John McBomb bought like rubes at a hillbilly carnival con game. I say we need to PUNISH that feckless failure and NOT REWARD it. Larry Johnson just doesn't seem to get this concept.

The time to throw the bastards out has come again. First them. Then him, if he doesn't deliver. First things first.

To which Larry Johnson replies:

Maybe Larry thinks Barack Obama was pandering to Pat Buchanan when he opposed the invasion of Iraq. :-)

The rightwing fringe were more opposed to the war than the lefties. Is Ron Paul not an object lesson?

As long as one has no interest in the truth of matters, any conjecture is allowable to demean others.

Best, Terry

What's wrong with pandering to liberal voters? If only more candidates would do the same! We've had decades of pandering to social conservatives, corporate conservatives, and warmongering conservatives. The result is stagnant wages, growing debt, increasing economic inequity, greater government ineptitude, growing financial insecurity, a ballooning trade deficit, reduced respect for the Bill of Rights, and a draining war in Iraq. Don't you think it's about time someone pandered to the liberals just a little bit?

Obama said Iraq was a preemptive war based on faulty evidence and an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

In addition the "root causers" said that our behavior towards Muslims explained, and even justified, 911 and that if we wanted to improve relations with them we would have to sacrifice Israel (of course they didn't openly say that. Instead they talk about forcing Israel back to 1967 borders, denuclearizing the entire area, substituting a bi-national, secular state for "fascist" Israel, etc.).

But supporters of the war said Saddam was a vicious tyrant who hated the United States and would do anything to strike a blow against it. Thus it was too dangerous to wait for absolute proof.

And

A very strong response to 911 was a must. Otherwise the Muslim world would believe Al Qaeda's claim that our reluctance to take casualties made us a paper tiger...and would lead to ever more and stronger attacks on our interests world-wide.

The author of this article is a Hillary smearmongerer. Obama's position on the war was thoroughly vetted. He was against it. He spoke out on the record against it during his run for Senate.

Hillary Clinton has surrogates do her dirty work because she is too embarrassed to keep asserting claims like these in public.

This is what she is about. Attack politics. Swifties.

What did Hillary Clinton do? What did she really do in her career? 3 big things, all a failure.

1. Healthcare nonreform in the early 1990s to the point the crisis is worse than every 15 years later.

2. Her Iraq vote which she now admits she wants back.

3. Her campaign in which she came in the clear frontrunner and then mismanaged. She ran out of money so she had to lend $5 mil of her own. She is firing people right and left for low blows and poor performance. And she is fearmongering.

It's time for a change. A real change.

Yes we can!

Hillery Clinton's resume, In a Nutshell.

I married a man who became a State Governor, and then the President of the USA.

Everything that he did that worked, was because of my help.

Everything that failed, was because I had nothing to do with them.

When you marry the right person, you get to jump to the head of the line, instead of having to work your way to the top, on your own merits, while all the while screaming Experience, Experience, Experience.

Far more important than the minutae of when Obama opposed the war and why is the observation that then, as now, Obama was and is a shrewd political calculator. His skills in this regard are impressive and one can easily be enticed to forget it which is something the "Obama for Messiah" crowd seems not to understand.

I think this very crafty politician is likely to be the Pet Rock of political marketing in that he continues to maintain a very vague and all encompassing rhetoric which provides maximum opportunity to all points on the political spectrum to project their hopes and desires onto him while also maintaining maximum freedom for him to take any position he feels like taking once elected without anyone being able to say he flip flopped. I think it's unquestionable that he will take the corporate centrist position on everything, but I'm open to being proved wrong on that.

It's a dangerous posture for a politician to adopt because the truth is that his platform of "hope" and "change" may or may not be about those things. Nobody really knows. We don't even know if he knows exactly what he means because he never clearly spells it out and that is not by mistake. There are reports by press insiders that the Obama people are doing a lot of winking and nodding about how he's going to be hard on the right, he's really going to shake up the status quo it's just that for now he cannot say so explicitly because of the politics of it all, but there's no public evidence at all that this will be the case. Quite the contrary.

For example, does he strongly condemn the lawlessness of AG Mukasey? Does he advocate investigation and prosecution to the fullest exent of the law ALL of the crimes perpetrated by the Bush regime and it's vast array of criminal cronies and henchmen? You never hear a peep out of Obama on these subjects. Obama is just a very shrewd political operator (nothing wrong with that BTW) who has a good marketing scheme going at the moment. The problem is those who've so bought into the marketing ploy they actually believe there's something more to the guy than there is. That willingness by him and his campaign to deceive the willingness of his supporters to be misguided and misled will lead to a very bitter blowback for Obama from the electorate when they finally figure out he's just blowing the same old political smoke up their asses---smoke they all swore they'd never fall for again. And worse, for the liberals and lefties who support him, they have against all reason abandoned their bedrock principles to support him on the "if come" and folks it ain't gonna be coming. He's just another corporate, centrist politician in a nice new package. Meet the new boss...

Well, we know for certain that Hillery is all of those things, so at least with Obama we will still have a chance that he will live up to expectations. As Hillery herself keeps on telling us: The reason for to vote for her is that people should abandon all hope.

OK, well I don't think anyone seriously believes that in 2002 Obama actually knew the details of how the disaster would play out. That's ridiculous.

Obama did not say, for example, that the war would cost $3 trillion, or about $1 billion for each of the 3000 or so 9/11 murders that we're supposedly avenging against the wrong country.

However, he did say,

"I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda."

Sounds like pretty good judgment.

It wasn't politically risky to be antiwar in Chicago in 2002.

I don't know. Apparently Sen. Clinton thought it was politically risky to be antiwar in New York.

"Iraq was a mistake but it was not Hillary's mistake."

Sorry but Hillary's vote to give George W. Bush a blank check to launch his mistaken moronic invasion of Iraq was Hillary's mistake. It along with her mistaken moronic vote on Iran will cost her the nomination.

What does a strong response to 911 have to do with invading and occupying Iraq?

We blew our message to AQaeda when we let BinLadin get out of Tora Bora as a hero