Left I on the News

Joseph Wilson slams Barack Obama for his claims about his "superior judgment" with respect to the invasion of Iraq and his positions on Afghanistan and Iran. Here's a sampling, about Iran:

On Iran and the question of designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, the junior senator from Illinois was not quite so clever at avoiding taking a position. He first co-sponsored the "Counter-Proliferation Act of 2007," which contained explicit language identifying the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. He subsequently claimed to oppose the Kyl-Lieberman sense of the Senate resolution proposing the same thing. Obama's accountability problem here is that he didn't show up for the vote on that resolution -- a vote that would have put him on record. Then he declined to sign on to a letter put forward by Senator Clinton making explicit that the resolution could not be used as authority to take military action. All we have is Obama's rhetoric juxtaposed with his co-sponsorship of a piece of legislation that proposed what he says he opposed.

The amusing thing about the article, similar to Clinton's campaign itself (of which I infer from the article that Wilson is a supporter, though he doesn't expicitly say so), is that the entire line is "Obama is no better than Clinton." Which I definitely agree with! It's just not much of a recommendation! Consider the quoted bit, for example. So Clinton voted to brand the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization, but we're supposed to give her props because she put forward a letter (a letter!) saying that the resolution wasn't authority for military action. Is that her idea of showing off her Washington "experience," pretending that a letter she writes overrides a vote she cast in Congress?

And now Obama is out with a video claiming that he is "the one, the only one, who had judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq War from the start." Uh, Senator, did you forget about several million of us who had "judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq War from the start," not to mention one prominent former Presidential candidate (Kucinich) who not only opposed it from the start, but every day thereafter when it came to voting for money to keep that war going, unlike, say, you?