Holbrooke's Tortured Hillary Iraq Vote Excuse

The Hillary campaign is in trouble and she's going to need every vote she can muster. Her vote on the Iraq war giving the President the authority to invade is one of those issues that have been dogging her since the campaign began and she's trying to make amends to the nutroots for that vote without actually going so far as to apologize like Silky Pony did.

Enter former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke who blames Hillary's vote on...Colin Powell who was "deluded" by the evil men in the White House. He also says Clinton voted to give Bush the go ahead to invade because she thought it would stop him from invading. Got that? Me neither:

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke gave a lengthy defense of that vote, which centered on Clinton's hope that Bush would use the Senate's support to avoid war. A Monitor editor asked why Clinton wasn't naïve to hope that Bush would use the vote to avoid military conflict.

"Here's why I know she's telling the truth," said Holbrooke, who was in New Hampshire to stump for Clinton. "After I left the U.N., I remained in very close touch with Kofi Annan; he's a very close friend. And at exactly the same time, but after the Senate vote, we were at Kofi's residence, my wife and I, and (Colin) Powell had just been up there, and Powell was trying to get the 15 votes at the Security Council for Security Council Resolution [1441], which ultimately passed. And I said, 'What's going on?' And Kofi said, 'He's told us that if we get a unanimous vote, we can avoid war.'

Let me break in for a second here. So not only was Clinton idiotic enough to vote for war to prevent war but so was Kofi Annan? Two peas in a pod, both gloriously dim-witted I guess.

"The French ambassador at the time was Jean-David Levitte, who is now (French President Nicolas Sarkozy's) national security adviser, and the British ambassador was Sir Jeremy Greenstock. . . . Both told me exactly the same thing: Powell had said to their face what Hillary had said earlier in her speech. . . . She will tell you she had private assurances from (Condoleezza) Rice and from Powell. I know she's not making it up, because three of the best diplomats in the world - Kofi Annan, Greenstock and Levitte - told me exactly the same thing, all of it from Powell."

The Monitor followed up by asking whether Holbrooke thought Powell was "being duplicitous" or "was duped."

Holbrooke responded that, "I think he deluded himself, because his ethos could not allow him to believe that the commander in chief and the vice commander in chief of the country had sent him into battle knowing that he was carrying a poison pill. . . .What you're talking about really is a psychodrama about a guy who deluded himself. So my guess is that he believed what he was doing, he didn't know he was lying - it's too big a leap. But his silence on this issue tells you how deeply he must be bleeding inside."

OK, where to begin? Let's start with the fact that a "deluded" Powell convinced the "three best diplomats in the world" and the brilliant Senator from NY that a vote for war was a vote to not go to war. Call me cynical but if you vote for something, doesn't it mean that you support that position and if the case were to stop war, why did Hillary vote with the majority to authorize? She sure sounded hawkish at the time.

What Holbrooke is suggesting is that Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joints Chiefs and at the time Secretary of State, was conned by Bush and Cheney into making the statements he did to the UN. Sorry, I can't believe that Powell didn't see the same evidence that everyone else had seen and he also saw the evidence back in the early 90's. I don't know how much info he was privy when Bill Clinton was in office and was lobbing missiles into Baghdad every time the Lewinsky story flared up, but I imagine he was keeping some tabs on Iraq.

Holbrooke is just another Clinton crony who will fall on his sword to save the oily Clinton machine. Shaheen this week, Sandy Burglar last year and the list goes on and on. Holbrooke's excuse destroys any semblance he had of a trustworthy reputation.

This is just another example of Hillary's campaign trying to play all sides of an issue. It's spin at best, revisionist history at worst and I believe it will flop with the people it's meant to convince--namely the nutroots--due to the utter transparency of the lie.