Mr. Obama, please gimme a break! As thoroughly documented, your position against war was totally based on political calculation. Had you been in the Senate, you could have easily voted "Present" or skipped the town. Your position agaisnt war could mean you were good but also very likely mean you were lucky. You are making too much out of a single incident.

People make good decisions based on life experience. Decisions made without thoroughly reviewing evidence are hunches, are gut feelings. That's what Bush has been doing! Are you telling us that you were born with good judgements and you are so much better than Clinton, Dodd, Biden, and Edwards, who voted no based on much more information available to them.

Sir, does your arrogance know no boundary?

Oh, puhlease, clinton II was playing politics over this the minute it hit the press. Oh, its ok for clinton II to play politics, but no one else. Everyone else is just supposed to agree with clinton II's spin that she has all this bs experience and that if she were in the white house blah, blah, blah. Anybody else says a gd thing in response and oh, they're playing politics.

Who knows, if this would have happened she might have been on a speaking engagement in bora bora and the vp would have had to deal with the crisis. Which might not be a bad thing because the vp would presumably have some experience.

Aimey Mays,

Obama at the time explained why he opposed the war, so we can judge whether he was simply lucky, or rather exercised good judgment. His speech is here:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Barack_Obama's_Iraq_Speech

Some highlights:

"I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. 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 and 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."

"Now let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history."

"I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars."

So was Obama just lucky, as you suggest? Or was he in fact simply right?

The transcript of Obama’s misguided attempt to defend Axelrod can be found at Baltimore Sun.

Said Obama: “You know, I—I have to-I have to—Wolf, you know, I heard—I heard—I don't need to—I don't—I don't need to hear what you read because I was—you know, I overheard it when he said it, and this is one of those situations where Washington is putting a spin on it. It makes no sense whatsoever.”

Aimee Mays,

Of course, neither Axelrod nor Obama directly placed the blame for Bhutto's death on Clinton.

By the way, to whom did you think Evan Bayh was referring when he said: "The job of the next president is not to be entertainer in chief"?

Obama can only hope that this is the most difficult defense he has to mount in this campaign

Juan Cole - Dec. 27, 2007 | The assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday provoked rioting in Islamabad and Karachi, with her supporters blaming President Pervez Musharraf, while he pointed his finger at Muslim extremists. The renewed instability in Pakistan came as a grim reminder that the Bush administration has been pursuing a two-front war, neither of which has been going well. Bush's decision to put hundreds of billions of dollars into an Iraq imbroglio while slighting the effort to fight al-Qaida, rebuild Afghanistan, and move Pakistan toward democracy and a rule of law has been shown up as a desperate and unsuccessful gamble. The question is whether President Musharraf now most resembles the shah of Iran in 1978. That is, has his authority among the people collapsed irretrievably?

Heckuva job Hillary

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/12/27/bhutto/

DemAC :

why would you pick out only the top of the transcript and omit the part where Obama actually explains the context and response?

either you are an idiot, who doesn't know that you're supposed to provide context when trying to present someone else's view.

or you're dishonest, if you did know you're supposed to provide context and simply choose to ignore it because you thought that would make the person you're attacking look worse.

either way, you should probably stop posting comments.

blackstar,
If you pull your little index finger out from wherever you store it and click on the link provided, you can read the full transcript in all its glory, context, response and all.

Now you tell me how Obama acquires his good judgment.

How would I know? It is not as if I am his biographer. For all intents and purposes, it really matters not whence his good judgement comes; it merely matters that he possesses it.

O-Bomb-A lacks the experience, the seasoning and, yes, the judgment to be President.

Now is not the time for O-Bomb-A's reckless and naive brand of “leadership”.

We have had our fill of this sort of schoolboy bluster from O-Bomb-A's Republican counterpart, G.W. Bush.

Oh my. Obama is caught lying on national TV in his misguided attempt to defend Axelrod.

”Obama was on CNN last night and NBC/NJ's Aswini Anburajan reports that during the interview, Obama was grilled by Wolf Blitzer on whether his chief media strategist, David Axelrod, had placed blame on Hillary Clinton for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. "I don't need to hear what you read because I was -- you know, I overheard it when he said it, and this is one of those situations where Washington is putting a spin on it. It makes no sense whatsoever," he said.

However, this could not have occurred since Axelrod had spoken to a large scrum of reporters in the back of the hall where Obama gave his speech, well after Obama had left the room.”

Come on, DemAC, that is beneath you. You ordinarily write sensible posts; please do not sully your own good name by grasping at straws here. Even if Sen Obama was fibbing when he claimed to have overheard Axelrod, could this possibly matter in any conceivable fashion? Come to that, are you really in a position to prove that he did not overhear Axelrod over some sort of walkie-talkie system used by the campaign, or some such? This is simply too small to bear the weight of the critique which you are attempting to build on it.

Why on earth didn’t Obama just distance himself from Axelrod’s indefensible statement, like Clinton continually has been made to do when people around her make mistakes?

Says Taylor Marsh: “But instead, Obama walked waste deep into the mess, owning it himself and sticking up for Mr. Axelrod, when a simple apology would have been the smarter and classier thing to do. But no, instead Obama turned obstinate and stubbornly got his back up. It was a huge mistake on a day filled with amateur turns.”

My theory: Obama has started to believe in his own campaign’s talking points and actually thinks he’s got superior judgment to everybody else. Big mistake.

Oh, by the way greg, have you read demac's posts lately? I think labeling them as "sensible posts" is a bit of a stretch.

Greg DeLassus wrote: Incidentally, dear DemAC, might I ask you for a little help. Whenever I try to create an HREF link, the result is simply a word or two in red with underlining, but which does not connect to the URL I have attempted to embed in it. How is it that you manage to make your HREF links actually connect to their content?

Make sure your link of choice fits exactly between the quotation marks. And never forget the http://

Good luck.

Doh!!! I did a perfect HREF and forgot that it reads HREF
Double Doh!!!

Use the Use the following HTML tags:
*insert clickable text here*

Remove the “*”

Make sure your link of choice fits exactly between the quotation marks. And never forget the http://

Now, good luck.

Dear DemAC,

No problem, I used the "view source" option to see what you really wrote. Let's see if I got the hang of it:

Click here!

What's so indefensible? I don't get it.

It's good that Obama came out and cleared that up. Anyone with half a brain could see that Axelrod wasn't blaming the death on Sen. Clinton, but that her vote for the war has caused even more problems and that we've lost focus.

[I]t was a really stupid attempt at blaming Clinton for Bhutto’s death while at the same time showcasing Obama’s ignorance on Pakistan and all things foreign.

Well, here we are again at the problem of perspective. You think that this was a really stupid gaffe. Folks like Blackstar and myself look at the same event and arrive at a different conlcusion. From where I am standing Axelrod's statement (while hardly a shining example of brilliance) was really a non-event. To my mind, Sen Obama is not apologizing because there is no offense for which to apologize.

Neither your opinion nor ours, however, really amounts to much. You were a Clinton supporter before Axelrod's statment, and you are a Clinton supporter still. Nothing has changed. I was an Obama supporter before Axelrod's statement and I am an Obama supporter still. Nothing has changed. What really matters (and is really hard to determine) is whether anyone on the fence (a class of folks rather hard to find on this blog) was swayed one way or the other by the unfolding of this event. I guess we will see as the primaries and caucuses actually take place, but for what little my opinion matters, I am hard pressed to believe that this event will make much of a difference in the end.

And demac, what's wrong with the points raised? Are they false? Just because you say they are stupid remarks, doesn't make them so.

By the way, do you have a quote where axelrod tried to "pin the murder on clinton [II]"? Just curious.

Stupid comment by a lowlife, hyperaggressive man. Obama must live with having had the crass and equally aggressive sensibility to pick him. More judgement issues, I believe.

Axelrod ought to get "shaheened" for this one. Speaking of which, check this one out: http://www.shaheened.com - it is a pretty nice new political word!

On the substance, there are two very serious problems with what Axelrod and Obama are saying; in addition, there is a subtext to their remarks which is very damaging for Obama.
First of all, nobody knows who killed Bhutto or why. For Obama's camp to start assigning blame now, when the facts aren't even out, shows terrible judgment.
Second, blaming Hillary and Hillary alone makes no sense at all. It's completely insane.
The last problem is that there is an implication that Obama is weak, himself.
Why is it that Hillary can be blamed for how her actions in the Senate have led to Bhutto's death---including the recent Kyl_Lieberman vote---while nothing Obama has done or could have done is considered? Obviously one can only infer that Axelrod sees Hillary as strong, Obama weak.
I agree.