The Daily Background

This is absolutely unbelievable. Listen to the following four quotes:

“I expect this conflict in Iraq will not last long… I think our prayers ought to be with our young men and women in uniform, with their families, and with the President who sent them there and has to make the calls.”

– Bill Clinton, calling for everyone to get behind the president and the war, six days after the invasion began.

“I supported the president when he asked for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

– Bill Clinton, a few months after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“[As president after 9/11, you] have to say, ‘Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I’ve got to do that.’ That’s why I supported the Iraq thing.”

– Bill Clinton, explaining his support for the war in Iraq one year after the invasion.

“[We need to] Go back to fiscal responsibility and economic soverngty. And that will require people like me who got five tax cuts I should not have gotten in my income group and we had soldiers in Afghanistan and in Iraq, even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers.”

– Bill Clinton, November 27th, 2007, while campaigning for his wife in Iowa.

Come again? Bill Clinton is now telling Iowans he was against the Iraq war from day one. This isn’t true of course– he publicly supported President Bush’s push for war in 2002 and 2003, just like his wife. Hillary of course voted for the war, taking Dick Cheney’s word for what was in the 2002 NIE, the crucial document justifying the war that she didn’t bother to read, yet which influenced Senator Bob Graham to vote against the war.

Although Bill’s stance on Hillary’s vote is unknown, Hillary has refused to admit that her vote for invading Iraq was a mistake.

I have to say, on a personal level, there’s really nothing that stings more than a Democrat who was for the war on day one but eventually turned against it claiming that they were against it from the start. As somebody who was against the war from day zero, who remembers how difficult it was to be accused of being a traitor or a supporter of Saddam Hussein, this really, really stings.

Bill either really needs to clarify how the hell he “opposed” the war from the beginning or apologize to Iowans for telling them a straight up lie. Because I really can’t see how what he said could be interpreted as anything other than that.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog