Article okay as far as it goes, but surely the sore-loser question from a Hillary fan was not the best question of the evening.

I am sick and tired of the Hillary supporters crying and moaning!!!! It was a fair political process, why do you all of you keep saying it wasn’t? Are you referring to Michigan and Florida? BOTH states were told if they didn’t follow the rules they would lose their votes. What would have been totally and completely unfair would have been to count those votes when the two states broke the rules that WERE CLEARLY EXPLAINED along with a very clear explanation of the consequences. So AGAIN I ask what was so unfair? She lost, get over it! Now all of you say you will vote Republican? Do any of you even vote on the issues or do you just want a woman no matter what? Like all of you women jumping ship because McCain picked a woman. It is obvious MANY women in America only care if a woman holds some sort of office. You don’t care about the issues or about a fair political process that followed the rules. How sad!!!!!!

How any thinking person who followed events during the 1990s and through the current decade could take M. Albright seriously is a mystery. She expects I guess that everyone would forget her words and deeds. I encourage anybody that may have forgotten what she and others of her ilk were saying to visit http://powerlineblog.com/archives/005456.php and read the short archive of well documented quotes. There’s much more but it’s a good place to start. Please remember that so many times during the presidential campaign of 2000 Al Gore declared Saddam the greatest single threat facing our nation. He stuck to that line even after years of Al Qaeda atrocities and the lucky capture of the millenium bomber. Saddam was public enemy #1. Then we had 9/11 and we didn’t know what might be coming down the pike. We did know that Hussein had to go and Bush went before the UN and our own Congress and had them state their positions. When things are going good they ride along. When things are going tough they use it ( our security ) for political gain. A real disgrace. Who knows what she would have done under those circumstances. Probably sent Jimmy Carter to patch things up and make a deal in Baghdad like he did in Pyongyang.

shakazulu ..obviously you have blocked out the fact that the intelligence provided to Congress and the UN was nothing but a patchwork of lies put together by the Cheney hawks. I love it when the right wing says “well all you democrats voted in favor of the war”. Yes but those votes were based on lied perpetrated by the Bush regime. The Iraq war was unfounded! Period! Many young American patriots have dies so George Bush and Dicc Cheney could finish a job that should have been done By George Sr who instead stopped short. That in no way gives his son the right to go after him later. No WMDs! No ties to Al Qaeda BUT they sure told us both of these things existed. Give me a break. You cannot judge a persons vote that was tricked into making it. The lies and deceit of the Bush White House will come out and already are. Politicians think they can hide from history’s eyes but it always catches up with them!

Dan, please read and you will find that the drumbeat for war with Iraq began long before Bush and Cheney had any say in the matter. Al Gore, Madeline Albright, all of them had security briefings daily for years. It was, as I mentioned, during the 2000 election campaign that Al Gore declared Saddam the greatest security threat facing our nation. He could easily have said militant islam, or Osama Bin Laden, but he didn’t and I remember being surprised that he didn’t. It wasn’t even controversial at the time. I assumed that since Al Gore was known as the most involved vice president in the history of the country that he knew things that we didn’t know. Bush & Cheney weren’t feeding him any of that information. He had been briefed daily for eight straight years and he declared Saddam the greatest threat and when questioned further by the press he said that military force should be applied if necessary. After 9/11 I believe there were many people who thought it was necessary. Try and remember this was only a year and a half after the Clinton administration bombed Iraq. Bombing is an act of war (sic). Were Clinton, Gore, Albright, etc. lying to us all when they committed that act. Please read Dan.

Shakazulu, you’re right on track here. Democrats/liberals have a very foggy memory of how much of a failure the Clinton Administration was in regards to getting Bin Laden and going after Al Qaida. One point, with all the information that was presented at the time (and, as noted, it was SUBSTANTIAL) and information thus received that even Hussein’s generals thought there were WMDs, Obama was STILL against going to war with Iraq? Tell me, if he does become President and gets intelligence that Iran has developed The Bomb, will he also choose to be against pre-emptive strikes? I say it was bad judgement on his part to be against going to war with Iraq..when the Clinton and Bush Administrations BOTH acknowledged Hussein’s threat potential. Perhaps he didn’t have WMDs, but even his own generals didn’t know that (also, during Hussein’s interogations, he fully admited to lying to his generals). One other comment, does anyone remember the amount of Yellowcake that was removed from Iraq last year?

Bottom line my right wing freinds..Cheney and Bush DID lie, did beef up evidence, did create false evidence and sent us to war on false intelligence. Blame the Democrats all you want but they didn’t take us to war (enforcing the no fly zone was not a declared act of war; get your facts straight, not just what you like to label things). You need to read the book Curveball and learn just how deep the lies went. I find it funny how the right tries to blame the democrats for this war; you guys are REALLY reaching there. As I said, it’s all coming into the light now so say what you will. It was a war based on lies, no matter what ANY Democrat said leading into it. There was a TON of Democratic AND Republican opposition to the war until the UN briefing where the lies flew with ease. Obviously it was good judgment. He new Cheney and Bush were trumping up the charges. He new false intelligence when he saw it. Because of this you call his judgment bad?!?! Ha! Seems it proved very very good. Give me a break! Also if you follow the news a high ranking Republican came out this week and said he never would have approved the war vote but Cheney came to him and other top ranking repubs and told them outright lies about Iraq. He told them there was a definite Al Qaeda tie and that he had sound evidence Iraq had developed “suit case” nukes that were ready to deploy. You guys keep trying to justify the lie and the war. History will judge it the worst foreign relations fiasco America ever had!
Dan Breeding

Dan, here are the wars I blame on the Democrats:

World War II-Franklin Roosevelt
The Korean War-Harry Truman
The Vietnam War-John F. Kennedy
The Bosnian War-Bill Clinton

Which of these 4 wars were due to attacks against the US? Hmm..NONE. They were pre-emptive..weren’t they? I view both Iraq wars as pre-emptive. There is plenty of evidence that both Democrats and Republicans were looking at the same evidence regarding Hussein’s WMDs and his danger to the rest of the world. You libs love Hillary…and she was privy to much of the same intelligence information that Bush and Cheney were privy to, and she agreed to go to war with Iraq.

Dear “logicprevails”

It doesn’t seem like you paid too much attention in history class. Do you know about December 7, 1941? Perhaps the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was really just an attack on the Hawaiian people since it wasn’t actually a state yet? You must have your head up your poop hole to write something as idiotic as that. World War II was started by Roosevelt? Please pull your head out before you get to the polling stations this November.

Clinton was not responsible for starting the Bosnian war either, my poorly educated friend. When the Iron Curtain fell, the bankrupt governments of former communist nations could no longer pay the salaries of their security forces and police. What happens then? Anarchy, black markets develop, and mafia bosses take over, and leave the policing and security to militias formed along ethnic lines. This was what caused the Bosnian War.

LogicPrevails: I know you’re on my side here but if you’re going to write stuff like that, please stop. It’s embarrasing. I thought Dan’s rant was wacky till I read yours.

And now on to Vietnam: Kennedy certainly played a role in that one. But it took the lies of another Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, to get the US into that one after the false claim that the US Navy was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. This is what he rallied Congress with to support escalation…or maybe he called it a “surge”? Yes they were Democrats. I grant you that. But that was then, this is now. This war in Iraq, the one that we are dealing with in OUR time, is not yet history and it was started with blatant disregard for the truth. You can’t be blind to this fact anymore.

Oh, I forgot to tell you. That “Yellocake” story was fabricated too. Remember the CIA operatives whose names were made public by Dick Cheney’s office? (Arguably and act of treason in itself.) These were the same officials who checked into that “yellowcake” story and found it was false. Check your sources, “logicprevails”.

I should clear this up before you reply: The “Yellocake” you refer to was documented and safeguarded by UN inspectors before 1991. That is before George Sr.’s war. There is no evidence of any “Yellowcake” dating after 1991. The fact that this was documented by UN inspectors shows that Hussein was at least willing to cooperate previous to 1991, and apparantly he didn’t regain possession of it after 1991 despite it being 12 miles outside of Baghdad. If you only read the headline, you could easily conclude that this is proof of Saddam having weapons programs and as proof that the Bush White House did not lie. But sadly this is not the case. Furthermore, that connection to Niger was just one of the many lies that came out of the G.W. Bush White House leading up to the invasion.

Now Mike, there you go again. Getting all hyperventilated with the big conspiracy. Here’s a sharp rebuttal to your point of view on the yellowcake story. http://www.slate.com/id/2146475/ To get all worked up over these little details doesn’t prove anything. Does it really matter whether the psychotic terrorists who want to kill us are named Al Qaeda, or Islamic Brotherhood, or Derka Derka? There were about 150 good reasons to get S. Hussein but the main one was existential fear. If our intelligence services were as bad as they obviously were ( along with the rest of the world’s) then the government was flying pretty blind. Think about what was happening then and it may start making some sense. It’s too easy to hurl invectives. The same thing was done to Harry Truman and he was about at the same popularity level as Bush is now. History had something very different to say about him than was expected at the time. There’s a lot we don’t know and aren’t going to find out for a while. One thing we do know is that this is the most frightening time to live through since the last world war.

To correct this article, the long-winded, grand-standing, soapbox, McCain plant questioner was the 2nd question of the evening, not the 1st. The 1st questioner asked the secretary who she would advise Obama consider as a shortlist of candidates for the next secretary of state–she, diplomatically, refused to name names.

The bottom line is, boys, is war neccessary. Forget blaming the war on certain sides…