Former Republican Says No One Who Voted for the Iraq War Should Be President—Including Hillary Clint [View all]

[rhett o rick]

Former Republican Says No One Who Voted for the Iraq War Should Be President—Including Hillary Clinton
By John Nichols April 10
http://www.thenation.com/blog/203945/ready-hillary-pointed-objection-her-iraq-war-record

Lincoln Chafee just went there, as only Lincoln Chafee could.

The former Republican senator and independent governor of Rhode Island, who is very seriously exploring the prospect of challenging Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, said Iraq should be an issue.
Then Chafee got specific. He brought up the votes that he and Clinton cast in 2002, as members of the US Senate, on whether to authorize President Bush and Vice President Cheney to steer the United States toward war with Iraq.
Chafee, then sitting as a Republican, voted with Senators Russ Feingold, Paul Wellstone, and twenty others to block the rush to war.
Clinton, sitting as a Democrat, voted with Senator John McCain and 75 others to give Bush and Cheney their blank check.
Chafee calls that Clinton’s vote “the biggest mistake of many” on issues of foreign policy by the presumed frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic nomination.

But even those who support Clinton should recognize the lesson of 2008: “Inevitability” does not always translate into reality. And Democrats who believe Clinton will be their nominee should recognize something else: She will face questions about her record. Those questions will either come in a spirited primary process, or they will come in a fall race with a Republican. Lincoln Chafee is raising the toughest questions now. That is not merely appropriate, that is practical and necessary—for Clinton and for the Democratic Party.

I see this as very important from a couple of different aspects. One as John Nichols mentions above, H. Clinton will sooner or later, have to come to terms with her decision in 2002 to join Sen McCain and other war hawks to give George Bush and Richard Cheney a blank check to destroy the country and people of Iraq for some reason yet to be explained. Those that capitulated to the Republicons and shrugged their duties to balance power and hold the Republicons back from waging a very costly war, must share the responsibility.
I think some are in denial about just how terrible this decision was and how horrible the consequences were.

The second reason I think this article is important is that it points out how the Democratic Party is shifting to the Right. With people like Arlen Specter and Lincoln Chafee, switching parties, it shows that they think their ideologies fit with the New Democrats, the Third Way Wing of the Party. It's a win-win for our corporate masters.
We need a strong two party system to have checks and balances. Now we are looking at a Third Way Conservative Democratic Party, with a disenfranchised Progressive Wing vs. the Clown Party.