I heard Terry McAuliffe on NPR yesterday

[ashling]

defending Hillarity's refusal to say she made a mistake. in trying to put the blame on Bush, he made it clear that Bush had decided to go to war rather than use diplomacy - as if that was a big secret until after the vote.

Since Hillary will not say she made a mistake, she should be asked why she trusted Bush to do the right thing? This would be more helpful than the "mistake" thing, anyway.

It would be very useful for voters to understand how a candidate goes about making a judgement. Hillary apparenly made the judgement that we should trust this little man in the big white house. Why? What was it about Bush that made her think she could trust him?

Why, Senator, as it in your judgement reasonable to trust a person who had shown himself to be so untrustworthy?

[rhiannon55]

1. That's true -- WE knew not to trust him

How did SHE not know?:shrug:

[LSparkle]

2. It's all about presidential power for her

which is why I don't support her. She's been seduced by being in the White House and doesn't see a problem with curbing presidential power -- she wants to make it personal about Shrub when it should be about having written the Executive Branch a BLANK CHECK (dereliction of Congressional duty IMHO and worthy of an apology).

[patrice]

7. This is a very good point.

I think what you've said here is why she engaged in somekind of speculation about the decision, something similar to what I've tried to describe in my post below.

[emulatorloo]

3. from what I have read Colin Powell promised Senators that every avenue of diplomacy would be

followed,

But turns out that Powell was not in the loop.

I do wish that she would go on the record with that.

[ashling]

8. That was just obfuscating on the part of the admin.

Who really believed that Powell was going to have any real effect on things?

[Little Wing]

4. Slime

[tblue]

5. That's our story and we're sticking with it????? What is that?

I never forgave McAuliffe for what he did to Wes Clark in '04. I am SO GLAD we have the good Dr/Gov/Chairman Howard Dean instead of TM as our party chair!

[patrice]

6. I am not a Hillary supporter, but she must be treated fairly

so everyone can learn from what happened.

Mis-characterizing her decision is not fair (not that you are doing that, but others DO!). She could counter that by trying to explain her thinking better. I have been trying to figure it out:

I'm not a games theorist, so I'm not sure I have all of the possible combinations of possible factors below and I have no idea how to go about weighting them, but it goes something like this, doesn't it?:

One of the following sets of conditions describes any given individual making the decision about how to vote on the IWR:

They believed the lies.

They did not believe the lies, thought the UN gambit was legit, thought the UN gambit would work, and there would be no war.

They did not believe the lies, thought the UN gambit was legit, thought the UN gambit would not work, and there would be a war that would succeed in __________.

They did not believe the lies, thought the UN gambit was legit, thought the UN gambit would not work, there would be a war that would not succeed in __________, and that was okay because __________.

They did not believe the lies, thought the UN gambit was phony, thought the UN gambit might work anyway, and there would be no war.

They did not believe the lies, thought the UN gambit was phony, thought the UN gambit would not work, but there would be no war.

They did not believe the lies, thought the UN gambit was phony, thought the UN gambit would not work, and there would be a war that would succeed in _________________.

They did not believe the lies, thought the UN Gambit was phony, thought the UN gambit would not work, there would be a war that would not succeed in __________, and that was okay because ___________.

....................

Hillary probably also has a large and powerful Jewish constituency. I want to know how they figured in the calculations above.
Free Palestine!