Everyone else in the media is pounding Hillary Clinton for her tale, now
shown
to be fanciful, of dodging bullets on a Bosnian tarmac as first lady. But
if
you're looking for the best recent example of the lengths Mrs. Clinton
will go
to win the Democratic Presidential nod, consider that last week in
Philadelphia she used Joe and Valerie Wilson as campaign props.
Was George Galloway not available?
Mr. Wilson and his wife are darlings of the antiwar crowd for their roles
as
self-styled martyrs in the CIA "leak" fiasco. The former ambassador is
still
ca****ng in on his claim that President Bush lied us into war, and the glam
couple has had to endure Vanity Fair photo shoots, book tours and the
other
slings and arrows of outrageous modern celebrity.
Their role in the Clinton campaign seems to be to inoculate her against
Barack
Obama's claim that she voted wrong on Iraq in 2002. "I was involved in
that
debate in every step of the effort to prevent this senseless war and I
profoundly resent Obama's distortion of George Bush's folly into Hillary
Clinton's responsibility," Mr. Wilson recently wrote on his Huffington
Post
blog -- a view he echoed at the Clinton campaign event.
"The administration lied in order to secure sup****t for its war of choice,
including cooking the intelligence and misleading Congress about the
intent of
the authorization," Mr. Wilson continued. "Senator Clinton's position,
stated
in her floor speech, was in favor of allowing the United Nations weapons
inspectors to complete their mission and to build a broad international
coalition. Bush rejected her path."
This is the same Senator Clinton who spoke extensively of the threat posed
by
Saddam Hussein and his WMD, who endorsed the invasion as a way to remove
that
threat, whose husband endorsed the invasion, and who sup****ted the war for
years afterward until it began to jeopardize her chances of winning the
Democratic nomination. (See our February 8, 2007 editorial, "Hillary on
Iraq.")
As for Mr. Wilson, he was last seen campaigning for a Democratic
Presidential
hopeful for a brief period in 2004. John Kerry's campaign dumped him as a
spokesman that summer after the Senate Intelligence Committee found Mr.
Wilson
had lied in claiming his wife had played no role in sending him to Niger
to
investigate whether Saddam was seeking to acquire uranium yellowcake. The
same
bipartisan re****t found that Mr. Wilson's trip, which he had advertised in
a
splashy New York Times op-ed, had produced no information of any
intelligence
value.
So in order to blunt Mr. Obama's attacks over Iraq, Mrs. Clinton has
resorted
to relying on the word of someone whose antiwar inventions were too
embarrassing even for the Kerry campaign. Desperate times require
desperate
measures, and Mrs. Clinton is meeting the moment.
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