Note to the Clinton Camp about why anti-war voters can't forget/forgive/dismiss the IWR vote

AnarchoFreeThinker

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Mon Apr-07-08 10:35 AM
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Note to the Clinton Camp about why anti-war voters can't forget/forgive/dismiss the IWR vote

Here's the explanation, the context, I think some Clinton supporters are forgetting about the run-up to the war in Iraq. It can't be finessed or explained away. If you remember back to good old 2002 and 2003, you remember that almost all people counting themselves Progressives--before the war began-- knew:
1. That the administration's "reasons" for the war were bullshit, as was its supposed deliberation about whether to expand the war into Iraq.
2. That the war was only to serve the administration's political, economic, and/or ideological desires.
3. That the war would result in thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths (although nobody probably anticipated a million), as well as the loss of life of US troops, and the use of plenty of US resources.
4. That the war would be a disaster (although nobody perhaps could have predicted the extraordinary range of that disaster), given what we knew already of our country's "leadership."

I'd venture there were less than 10% of true progressives who didn't know these four things. In all likelihood, if you're reading this post right now, you knew these things before the war. You knew it. Don't forget that. Don't be fooled by re-writers of history.

And you also knew this:

5. That politicians in 2002 and 2003--many of them good Democrats--had become spineless, intimidated by the jingoistic fervor in our country, weak in the face of worries about challenges to patriotism, afraid of appearing soft. Yes, we knew, before the war in Iraq, that many of our old allies in the House and Senate had caved to external pressures and already had rhetorically made major political calculations in order to seem strong in time of crisis. And so we knew that when they voted "yea" on the Iraq War Resolution this was another political calculation--a massive calculation meant to preserve political careers and to inocculate the Democratic Party and its leaders from charges of lending support to the enemy, of being weak on terror, of being soft little doves in time of great crisis. We knew this. We railed against it right here. We lamented the betrayal--our betrayal--by the Democrats who we'd worked so hard to support in the past.

We fucking knew all this, as well as we KNEW:

6. That that Iraq War Resolution was, indeed, a war resolution--a political tool, a piece of propaganda wheeled out by the Republicans ONLY to legitimize war. We knew before our "president" began to roll in the troops, that HE WOULD ROLL IN THE TROOPS. WE KNEW IT. YOU AND ME. Right here. We knew it. This ain't freeper-fairytaleland. We don't, historically, view such things with naivete or without skepticism. We don't swallow spoon-fed MSM shit. We use our critical thinking lefto-heads. WE KNOW MANURE AT THE FIRST WHIFF OF IT. We fucking get it.

And that's the first--but certainly not the only--reason I do not support Hillary Clinton. When Barack Obama spoke out against the war WHILE IN THE MIDST OF A CAMPAIGN at a time when to do so took actual political courage, he acted with the rarest sort of conscience and political courage. At the time you and I were clandestinely freeway blogging or putting up posters of dissent or establishing underground networks of minor or even token resistance or communing here to lament what we all knew was coming, Barack Obama was taking a vocal public stance. He was facing down the climate of fear in our country, more so than I did and perhaps more than you did, too.

Now, I do not pretend to know what he would have done had the IWR come across his desk as a senator. I suspect I know--I do not know for sure. But I do know what Clinton did. I do know whose back she had. Her own. I do know she knew the IWR was a war resolution, because you and I knew that and she's an amazingly smart person. You and I knew the war was a ruse, that it was an exercise in neo-con self-interest, that the Cheney and his ideologues were force-feeding the public dogshit, that the war actually would be a disaster, that civilians whose only crime was to be subjected to Saddam's rule would pay with their lives in this war. We knew all that. She knew all that. If she didn't, then she's got no business being in the White House. If she did, but calculated her political fortunes nonetheless, then she has no business being in the White House.

John Kerry at least fully renounced his vote, which would be a start for Clinton. But in the end, it wouldn't change the fact that this is the first time we have a viable candidate this late in the process who offered up, publicly, WHAT YOU AND I KNEW BEFORE THE WAR BEGAN and who did so before the war began. There's no finessing, explaining, apologizing that can change that for Clinton. In the end it's about policy, record, leadership, judgment, decision-making ability, courage, conscience, and, finally now, accountability.

Progressives have something we haven't had before this presidential election: a choice on this issue. I chose the candidate who did not vote "yea" on the IRW. Because we all knew.