Below The Beltway

ABC’s Jake Tapper has picked up on yet another misrepresentation from the Clinton campaign:

In Eugene, Ore., Saturday. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., attempted to change the measure by which anyone might assess who criticized the Iraq war first, her or Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., by saying those keeping records should start in January 2005, when Obama joined the Senate. (A measure that conveniently avoids her October 2002 vote to authorize use of force against Iraq at a time that Obama was speaking out against the war.) She claimed that using that measure, she criticized the war in Iraq before Obama did.

But Clinton’s claim was false.

Clinton on Saturday told Oregonians, “when Sen. Obama came to the Senate he and I have voted exactly the same except for one vote. And that happens to be the facts. We both voted against early deadlines. I actually starting criticizing the war in Iraq before he did.”

As Tapper points out, Clinton’s selection of January 2005 as the starting point is convenient because it allows her to ignore the fact that she voted to authorize the war back in 2002 and voted in favor of various funding measures over the ensuing two years.

But the Clinton campaign has been moving the goalposts since the campaign started, so that’s not surprising.

The problem is, even with the new timeline, she’s still not telling the truth:

Scrambling to support their boss’s claim, Clinton campaign officials pointed to a paper statement Clinton issued on Jan. 26, 2005, explaining her vote to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State.

“The Administration and Defense Department’s Iraq policy has been, by any reasonable measure, riddled with errors, misstatements and misjudgments,” the January 2005 Clinton statement said. “From the beginning of the Iraqi war, we were inadequately prepared for the aftermath of the invasion with too few troops and an inadequate plan to stabilize Iraq.”

But Obama offered criticisms of the war in Iraq eight days before that, directly to Rice, in his very first meeting as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Jan. 18.

Obama pushed Rice on her answers to previous questioners regarding the effectiveness of Iraqi troops, and he criticized the administration for conveying a never-ending commitment to a US troop presence in Iraq.

“I am concerned about this notion that was pursued by Senator Biden and others that we’ve made significant progress in training troops,” Obama told Rice “Because it seems to me that in your response to Senator Alexander that we will not be able to get our troops out absent the Iraqi forces being able to secure their own country, or at least this administration would not be willing to define success in the absence of such security. I never got quite a clear answer to Senator Biden’s question as to how many troops — Iraqi troops — don’t just have a uniform and aren’t just drawing a paycheck, but are effective enough and committed enough that we would willingly have our own troops fighting side-by- side with them. The number of 120,000 you gave, I suspect, does not meet those fairly stringent criteria that Senator Biden was alluding to. I just want to make sure, on the record, that you give me some sense of where we’re at now.”

Obama concluded his brief q&a by saying “if our measure is bring our troops home and success is measured by whether Iraqis can secure their own circumstances, and if our best troops in the world are having trouble controlling the situation with 150,000 or so, it sounds like we’ve got a long way to go. And I think part of what the American people are going to need is some certainty, not an absolute timetable, but a little more certainty than is being provided, because right now, it appears to be an entirely open-ended commitment.”

In fact, six weeks after her new benchmark date, Clinton was sounding more like John McCain than anything else:

In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Feb. 20, 2005, Clinton said that withdrawing some troops or setting a date for withdrawal would be a “mistake.”

“I don’t believe we should tie our hands or the hands of the new Iraqi government,” Clinton said. “We don’t want to send a signal to the insurgents, to the terrorists that we are going to be out of here at some, you know, date certain.”

Let’s see that makes it three blatant lies that we know about. Bosnia. Trina Bachtel. And now this.

At this point if Hillary told me what time it was, I’d have to check my watch to make sure.