Posted on by Mitchell Laurren-Ring

Reasons Not to Vote for Hillary Clinton: Never Wrong

In the biggest vote of her political life, Hillary Clinton (and the rest of the cowardly Democrats who would not go against George W. Bush for fear of their political careers ending abruptly) voted “Yes” to go to war with Iraq. Even after the so-called “intelligence” that was used to justify the war was shown to be a sham, she still supported the war nearly as much as turncoat Democrat Joe Lieberman. When her run for the presidency began in 2007, many began to speculate whether she should apologize for her vote. That speculation reached a fever pitch until she finally admitted that the war had been a mistake but only went so far as to say about her own vote that she had received faulty intelligence.

Her reasoning in this matter is faulty for two reasons. First, she did not vote for the Levin Amendment which would have required that the President allow U.N. inspectors more time to complete their job. If, as she claims, she was granting the President the power of war to use in diplomatic efforts to “disarm” Saddam Hussein, then the Levin Amendment would have been an important tool in those efforts. Secondly, and more importantly, in not admitting that her vote was wrong, especially in the way that she has, she is affirming the validity of the Bush administration’s preemptive war policy. Much like the administration, she has not learned the most valuable lesson of the war: preemptive war is wrong. As we found out, even “slam dunk” intelligence can be faulty. Even in the best of circumstances, relying on such intelligence is a gamble. Let’s assume, for example, that our intelligence community was 90% certain that the intelligence was correct. That would still leave a 10% chance that we would be launching a war for no good reason.

That war has resulted in the deaths of 400,000 to one million people. Even under Saddam Hussein, Iraq never saw its people killed in such numbers. So our gamble was incorrect and the people of Iraq have had to pay the price. That’s why preemptive war is wrong. And that’s why Hillary Clinton should repudiate it and admit that she made a mistake in supporting it in 2002. Unfortunately, like President Bush and his supporters, she seems incapable of admitting her mistakes and apologizing for them.

Her latest political gaffe involves remarks made about the length of the ongoing Democratic primary and the fact that it will likely remain unresolved until some time in June:

My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.

On my first reading, I thought she was merely making a case for staying in the race into June. However, with a little context, it can be easily interpreted to mean that she is continuing her candidacy in case Barack Obama is assassinated. That context was provided by Mike Huckabee in remarks at an NRA event last week:

That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He’s getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him and he — he dove for the floor.

I have no doubt that neither Huckabee nor Clinton were purposefully suggesting that someone should shoot Obama, but their remarks make it obvious that it is possible that someone could. Now they’ve put the issue in the forefront of the news. As I pointed out a few days ago, words can have a different meaning than the person who spoke them intended. In this case, we should give Senator Clinton the benefit of the doubt (and all evidence points to her fully deserving it), but that does not lessen the negative impact that those words bring to this presidential campaign. So far, she has only sought to clarify her remarks, explaining what her intent was in saying them. She needs to go further and simply apologize for what she said, but history says that she can’t or won’t.

We’ve had eight years of a presidential administration that never admits its mistakes and never apologizes. We don’t need another president who can’t apologize.

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Update 5/24: