I was recently reading this column on obama v clinton, and came to this -

…the biggest problem many Democrats have with Clinton is not the fact that she’s a woman, but that she voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Had Clinton not voted for the Iraq war (and let’s be real, that’s what that vote meant), she would be a shoo-in. In fact, it is widely believed that Clinton cast her fateful vote because she calculated that, being a woman, she needed to appear even more “tough on national security” than her male Democratic colleagues (most of whom, of course, also voted for the war…)

So that got me thinking and looking up links that I hadn’t thought of since ‘04, and that is - who did (and more importantly who didn’t) vote for the war? The general excuse for democrats voting for it always sound something like “it was a different time, everyone was voting for it, we didn’t know what we were voting for, we weren’t voting for Bush to screw it up, etc etc.” (um, I maybe paraphrased)

Surely not everyone voted for it. And surely enough, the official votes show that 133 representatives and 23 senators said no thanks. Maybe some of them were just being partisan and would vote against anything Bush was for without reading it, but I’m sure more than a few of those ‘nays’ had the presence of mind to know that this was a clusterf**k waiting to happen. Sadly Clinton, Edwards and Kerry were not among them.

For me, this is the final exam question on each nominees’ case for presidency. It’s too bad that in 2004 we had no other choice. (oh wait, WE FREAKING DID)