A week back I drafted a post saying that MSNBC should take Chris Matthews off air unless he says he’s not running for Senate in ’08 then never posted it because Matthews is such a political genius that I almost forgive him. Last night he had another crushing insight. At about midnight, as he and Buchanan and Russert were agreeing that the Dems’ race is over, he said that the only reason Barack got his foot in the door in the first place and was now in a position to shut off the feeding tube was because of Hillary’s vote in 2002 to authorize the war. That’s why he got to run as a believable change candidate; and she didn’t: She had made a terrible mistake in judgment on the most important decision of the last 40 years.
Not Obama. As an Illinois state senator in October 2002, Obama, with a real sense of the moment, and some courage too, opposed the war and took on the neocons.
What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz
and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove
their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the
costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
Supporters of the decision to invade a country that did not attack us have tried to argue these facts away for a long time. They say that Obama would have made the same decision as Hillary if he had been holding statewide office (highly unlikely) or that Hillary’s vote was really not that meaningful because the whole establishment was sliding off the edge (exactly; the brave tried to stop the insanity). Or, yielding to Packerism, they say that George Bush and Rumsfeld just fought it the wrong way. These are all self-serving claims, so that war supporters don’t suffer in position for having blown the call. Eric Alterman used to wonder when we who opposed this war were finally going to get our dividend. It occurred to me after Matthews’s comment that the birds may finally be coming home to roost, six years on…
