Hillary Clinton, now stumping as a candidate for president in 2008, has now joined Democratic lawmakers like John Kerry and John Edwards in acknowledging that the vote to authorize George W. Bush to invade Iraq was a mistake:

“If we had known then what we know now, there never would have been a vote and I would have never voted to give this president that authority.”

The audience cheered. I don’t know why they cheered. That’s like a car crash victim saying that if he’d known the morning of the accident that someone was going to barrel into him, he’d have taken a different route. Or a robbery suspect admitting that if he’d known the surveillance camera would have taken such a clear picture, he wouldn’t have robbed that store.

It’s so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said, and certainly is not be deserving of cheers when it is: Of course they wouldn’t have voted the way they did if they knew then what they know now!

That’s why hindsight is always 20/20.

The real question here in my mind is, as former First Lady, who would have been in a position to get some information from her husband through his position as president, why didn’t Hillary know then?

If you believe all of the political bloggers — and I don’t — they knew long before the vote. If our lawmakers were as smart as the bloggers claim to have been, they’d have all been watching the events of 9/11 unfolding on live television, immediately certain that Bush would use the terror attacks as an excuse to go to war with Saddam Hussein. So why didn’t they know then?

I wonder why those bloggers aren’t our elected officials; we seem to be sending the uninformed to Washington these days and leaving those in the know stuck on Blogger and Wordpress. How did that happen?

John Edwards said this in a November, 2005 op-ed article for The Washington Post:

“But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed.”

“It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002.”

Bill Clinton, in a July, 2003, Larry King interview, said:

“People can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons.”

If he believed that to be true in 2003, there should be no question about whether to second-guess the votes in 2002. The intelligence information that would have been available as he was leaving office — the materials that would have led him to that unquestionable conclusion — wouldn’t have been the “flawed, misleading” intelligence information that Bush produced; it would have been based on the information obtained during the Clinton administration.

So the debate still rages on over those elusive weapons of mass destruction. If they were there, they’re either not there now, or they’re hidden in the same tear in the space-time continuum where Osama bin Laden is kicking back.

President Bush has flat-out accepted responsibility for the errors made during the war. As well he should have. There have been many. But Bush didn’t get to the point of liability without asssitance.

The people who voted to give the president the authority to go to war made it too easy.

Even if Bush and Cheny personally fabricated every word of intelligence they presented, they still were given the authority to go to war. Conditions? Obviously they weren’t strict enough, were they? If the lawmakers had known then what they knew now, and the rest of the country was in the dark, they wouldn’t have voted no because it would have made them look too passive to an angry public still reeling from 9/11. But we all know that at the very least, they’d have made it a hell of a lot harder for Bush to make the case that would allow him to go to war. Those conditions they put on that authorization would have been a lot more specific, and would have required a lot more proof. He’d have had to be a lot more convincing to talk them out of what they already knew.

In this country, when a bartender continues serves someone who’s obviously too drunk to drive who then gets into a deadly accident, some jurisdictions allow the bartender to be punished. When a parent owns a gun and doesn’t take sufficient precautions to keep their child from getting that gun and fatally shooting someone, it’s the parent who faces jail time, not the child.

There are Democrats who think that Bush has to be blitzed out of his mind or possess the mentality of a small child, if not both. So why did they, and their Republican counterparts, serve him up more drinks and leave the gun cabinet unlocked so he could take us into Iraq on flawed intelligence without a clear plan for getting out?

My question takes no blame away from Bush about what has happened since we went in; it simply seeks to question why those who helped Bush get there are able to get off the hook by playing word games with history to draw attention from their own complicity.

Is that too unreasonable a question to ask? I don’t think so. Do you?