So says Mike Lupica of the NY Daily News:
Look to W, not Hil, for 'sorry'
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
Now that Sen. Hillary Clinton is running for President there is this idea she is supposed to apologize because she ran with the crowd in 2002 and voted for George Bush's war in Iraq.
John Edwards goes after Clinton on this in a big way, Edwards mostly saying he was wrong now with his own vote to authorize the war as a way of getting some kind of early advantage on her.
Sen. Barack Obama goes after her, too, reminding everybody he was against the war in '02 as a state senator from Illinois, which was somewhat like voicing opposition from the bleachers at Wrigley Field.
Clinton, for now at least and maybe forever, does not play along. Instead she stands up in a hall in Dover, N.H., over the weekend and says this:
"I have to say that if the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or who has said that vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from."
It does not mean that she should win the nomination or that she should be the first woman President or that people who don't like her or her husband should suddenly change their minds. There is too much race to be run, and anybody who tries to call this thing now should have his or her head examined.
It was still the best moment she has had, whatever her reasons for saying what she did. And by not playing along with either Edwards or Obama, it is not as if she were playing to the crowd. She was asked a question in Dover about her refusal to say she was wrong and, according to Michael McAuliff in the Daily News, her answer was given "to a nearly silent auditorium."
The next time she is asked the question, in New Hampshire or Iowa or even South Carolina, she should say that she will apologize after the President does.
Again: You make up your own mind about the senator from New York, and whatever baggage you think she brings to all this. But she would make a better President than the one we have because anybody would.
This isn't her war. It is his.
She should say she will apologize right after Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the fired secretary of defense, do the same. They are a couple of hacks out of another time, especially Rumsfeld, who must have imagined this country's original strategy in Iraq on the back of a napkin.
Hillary Clinton should apologize for her war vote when this President apologizes for anything, for all the dead and all the wounded, for all the reasons he gave and is still giving for this war. Now, suddenly, the great bogeyman of the conflict over there is Iran. We hear last week from the President that "a part" of the Iranian government is sending explosives to Iraq, and that those explosives have been responsible for 170 coalition deaths.
Clinton was wrong once, the way Edwards was wrong, and Sen. Joe Biden, and Sen. Christopher Dodd. This administration, on the other hand, has been wrong for years, from the time this President first started beating the drums for this war on the first anniversary of Sept. 11. When does he apologize for that, for using Sept. 11, propping himself up on the rubble, to go after a tyrant who had nothing to do with blowing up our buildings?
When does anybody in this administration apologize for the war profiteering that has gone on, practically under all their noses? When do they apologize for not having the proper facilities to handle the maimed and broken soldiers who have made it back half-alive from Iraq and Afghanistan, physically broken or psychologically broken or both?
These are the soldiers whose stories have been told so brilliantly over the past few days by Dana Priest and Anne Hull in The Washington Post, as they have described the shame of conditions at places like Building 18 - what they call the "Other Walter Reed" - across the street from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
"On the worst days," Priest and Hull write, "soldiers feel like they are living a chapter of 'Catch-22.' The wounded manage other wounded. ... Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs ..."
This President thinks he can get another hundred billion dollars or so every time he needs the money for Iraq, doesn't think anybody in the Senate should even debate that. But where do these soldiers go for the money to pay for the care some of them are going to need for the rest of their lives? Who do they talk to about that?
Hillary Clinton can admit she was wrong right after Gen. Colin Powell admits he was wrong to throw in with Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld on this war, and the trumped-up reasons for entering into it, in the first place.
Not Hillary Clinton's war. Theirs. It is theirs. She didn't make the world more dangerous than it already was. They did. You want an apology? They go first.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/499486p-421108c.html
