Oy, Hillary. Oy.

Hawkish Hillary:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday defended her vote to authorize war in Iraq amid growing unease among liberal Democrats who could determine the potential 2008 presidential candidate's future.

"I take responsibility for my vote, and I, along with a majority of Americans, expect the president and his administration to take responsibility for the false assurances, faulty evidence and mismanagement of the war," the New York senator said in a lengthy letter to thousands of people who have written her about the war.

At the same time, she said the United States must "finish what it started" in Iraq…

"It is time for the president to stop serving up platitudes and present us with a plan for finishing this war with success and honor," she wrote.

Well, that’s a fucking dandy idea. I mean, who better to finish a war with success and honor than the people who bungled and lied about it from the start?

The Bush administration is clearly incapable of finishing this war with success and honor, so what, exactly, is the point of suggesting they ought to do so? Only someone exceptionally foolish or uninformed could believe at this point that there’s any chance of the Bush administration doing anything but continuing to botch this tragic endeavor, and Hillary may be a lot of things, but foolish and uninformed aren’t among them. So her position is disingenuous. Surely she doesn’t have a complete disregard for the lives of the soldiers and Iraqis that will be lost as this thing continues to spiral, so the only explanation for saying something so patently stupid is an unwillingness to take the lead on the issue. It’s as though she looked at what happened to Murtha and decided that presenting an empty challenge to Bush is a better idea.

I’ve got news for her. Empty challenges are no solution to a situation as FUBAR as Iraq.

And she can “expect the president and his administration to take responsibility for the false assurances, faulty evidence and mismanagement of the war” until the cows come home, but it ain’t gonna happen. It’s an imperative of the opposition party to make him take responsibility, to hold them accountable. Step up to the bloody plate and swing the bat. Otherwise, shut the fuck up.