Hillary Clinton's statements tonight attempting to support her vote for the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment have led me to completely rule her out when I am casting my Democratic primary vote.
Very early in tonights debate, Mike Gravel hit on the vote today regarding the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment. Democratic Presidential nominees Joe Biden and Chris Dodd voted against the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment, Hillary Clinton voted for it, and Barack Obama did not vote at all on it.
Gravel made his statements in response to a question by Russert about whether and how he would end the Iraq War if he were in the Senate. After answering the question he continued as follows:
"Tim, you're really missing something. This (the debate onstage about how to end the Iraq War) is Fantasyland. We're talking about ending the war. My God, we're just starting a war right today. There was a vote in the Senate today. Joe Lieberman, who authored the Iraq Resolution has authored another resolution, and it is a fig leaf to let George Bush go to war with Iran. And I want to congratulate Biden for voting against it... Dodd for voting against it... and I'm ashamed of you, Hillary, for voting for it. You're not going to get another shot at this. Because what's happened, if this war ensues... we invade... and they're looking for an excuse to do it. And Obama was not even there to vote."
After 2-3 seconds of awkward laughter, Hillary responded with this:
"Well I don't know where to start. Let me respond. My understanding of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran is that it is promoting terrorism. It is manufacturing weapons that are being used against our troops in Iraq. It is certainly the main agent of support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and others. And in what we voted for today we will have an opportunity to designate it as a terrorist organization which gives us the options to impose sanctions on the primary leaders to try to begin to put some teeth into all this talk about dealing with Iran. We wouldn't be where we are today if the Bush Administration hadn't outsourced our diplomacy with respect to Iran and ignored Iran and called it part of the Axis of Evil. Now we got to make up for lost time and lost ground."
This week Jim Webb described the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment as, Cheney's fondest pipe dream, and he warned the nation that, "At best, it’s a deliberate attempt to divert attention from a failed diplomatic policy... At worst, it could be read as a backdoor method of gaining Congressional validation for military action, without one hearing and without serious debate."
Most of the members of this community already understand how strongly the neoconservatives are pushing for war in Iran and how dangerous the situation is. If you haven't been keeping up on this, here is just a taste of what is to come in the weeks ahead as the GOP ramps up their "We Must Attack Iran" PR blitz:
Here is what Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films has already assembled regarding the push my a radical fringe of our body politic to wage war with Iran:
Most of the members of this community also understand how ridiculous Hillary's statements are, but I want to take a moment to draw attention to two key points:
- She began her answer, continued her answer, and ended her answer by quoting chapter and verse from the Republican talking points and the neoconservative framing of the issue. She declared Iran to be a sponsor of terrorism and a nation engaged in a proxy war with America. Michael Ledeen was probably rubbing himself with pudding somewhere while reporting that the Ayatollah is again dead.
- She claimed that her vote today somehow had something to do with a hypothetical future vote as to whether Iran's Revolutionary Guard is a "terrorist organization". This is an absurd non sequitur. The vote today was wholly unnecessary and was in fact a distraction from a real and substantive debate about the ramifications of such a decision.
The vote today, without one hearing and with no substantive debate of any kind, state included the sense of the Senate that the United States "should designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization." Hillary cast her vote in favor of this today, skipping the whole "debate" idea altogether.
There is not a chance in the world that I will cast my primary vote in favor of a candidate who is so willing to play into GOP frames, so willing to lie in bed with the same neoconservative policy makers who have led us into the war in Iraq, and so willing to play silly semantic games with our nation's future. She clearly continues to trust the Bush Administration. Why she does this, I have no idea.