Posted by
RightTeacher on Monday, March 10, 2008 12:07:11 AM
Hillary's ad asks when the phone rings at 3 am, who would you want to answer it? My answer is, John McCain, easily. Clinton's point is that she has the judgment and experience that is needed at 3 am. Obama's answer is that he has the judgment because he made the right decision at the time.
Of course, Obama was not a senator then, and whether he would have initially voted against the war is open to debate. If, indeed, one believes him that he wold have voted against the war at the time, that should disqualify him from ever being commander in chief.
Clinton (Hillary, not Bill) says that knowing what she knew then, she stands by her decision. This is the correct answer. No other answer is possible. Imagine "Senator" Obama when the vote is taken. All intelligence since Clinton's time (Bill, not Hillary, remember him?) is that Saddam Hussein is developing WMDs. He has defied seventeen UN Resolutions. There are reports that he has been providing a safe haven for terrorists. Liberal journalists are critiquing the war because there are too many reasons to go to war. Even liberals who believe that we now "know" ("know" as much as liberals are capable of "knowing" things) that these things are not true, we remember that back then we thought those things were true. In that atmosphere, in that climate where we were so sure that Saddam needed to be regime-changed (even Clinton had told us that--Bill, not Hillary), how can Obama claim that he would vote "no."
If he is telling the truth, and no amount of threat to our country is EVER sufficient to bring our military to bear, that he would basically never consider actually defending this country, or his claim is a convenient lie.
I can only hope it is a lie. No one should ever be president if he refuses to defend his country when it is as threatened as we believed we were when we invaded Iraq.
Of course, we are not liberals. We know those things are as true as we thought they were. The decision was right then and it is right now. It would be wrong to snatch defeat our of the jaws of victory as both Obama and Clinton (Hillary, not Bill--well, Bill too) say we should. Only McCain is qualified to defend our country. Clinton is wrong, but at least she made the right vote when the war started. Obama should never be given the responsibility to defend this country if it is something he is unwilling to do.