Monday, December 10, 2007

NO-bama

I'm a few days late posting a link to this op-ed about Senator Obama's largely unfounded attacks on my gal Hill, but here it is anyway.

My favorite points?

Your position on the Iran Resolution. You criticized Sen. Clinton's vote in September supporting a Senate resolution asking the U.S. government to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG) as a "foreign terrorist organization," …. Yet you failed to disclose that you had co-sponsored a Senate Resolution (S. 970) in March 2007 that used exactly the same language to designate the IRG a "foreign terrorist organization."

And...

Your position on the Iraq war. You have criticized Sen. Clinton for supporting the October 2002 Iraq war resolution (just as the governor of your state, Rod R. Blagojevich, did when he was in the House of Representatives, as did former Sen. Max Cleland, who lost two arms and a leg in the Vietnam War, and 29 Democratic senators). You claim to have been opposed to that resolution before you became a U.S. senator.

Yet when you were asked in the fall of 2004, as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, how you would have voted on that resolution had you been a U.S. senator, you were quoted in The Chicago Tribune answering, “I don’t know.” Then in March 2007, your press secretary refused “eight times” to answer a New York Times reporter’s question as to why you couldn’t answer that question back in 2004. When pressed again, he said you refused to answer such a “hypothetical” question. So how can you accurately say that you opposed the war resolution when you said “I don’t know” — and how is it fair to criticize Sen. Clinton’s (and Gov. Blagojevich’s) judgment for doing so at that time — when she says today, “Had I known then what I know now [that there were no WMDs in Iraq], I would not have voted for that resolution”?

You also voted against Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) amendment in the summer of 2006 to set a deadline on withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq (as did Sen. Clinton and most Senate Democrats). Yet I don’t think you have ever reminded voters about that vote since you began your presidential campaign.

More OhKermie posting to come in the weeks ahead... sorry for being MIA!

2 comments:

Vanessa said...

So then if they are both the same, why would Hillary be any better?

Kelly said...

I was trying to emphasize that Obama is "throwing stones in glass houses" by characterizing Clinton's vote on Iran as a grave mistep (when he sponsored a similar bill less than a year ago), and by making sweeping criticisms of her vote on the war (when in reality he may have done the same thing). The fact that Hillary has yet to display such deeply hypocritical criticism of Obama (and moreover, that such criticisms are not the cornerstones of her campaign - as they are for Obama) makes her the "better" candidate on this point.