I assume that Senator Clinton's campaign hopes that most folks will not read "Her Way," by New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Jr., or the New York Times Magazine article adapted from the book, "Hillary's War."

Anyone that does will appreciate the transparently false picture that the Senator is transmitting about why she voted in 2002 to authorize going to war in Iraq.

The Senator's vote has become a point of discussion because of her reluctance to clearly explain her thinking then. Unlike Senator Edwards, she refuses to simply say she was wrong and express regret.

On the other hand, there has been no clear statement that at the time it was the right decision. One may assume that the latter is unpalatable for her because it would give credibility to President Bush.

Clearly, since that vote something has changed. She recently voted with only 13 other Senators to deny the additional emergency funding in support of the war effort that the President requested.

So what happened?

In one sense of consistency, we expect liberals to be allergic to personal responsibility and to seek every opportunity to be the victim. Here, Senator Clinton does not let us down.

Her story now is that she voted for the war, but it's really not her fault that she did.

George Bush lied to her.

According to Clinton, she thought that the resolution she was voting for meant that a new round of UN inspectors would be sent into Iraq. But, she was snookered.

As she put it in the debate the other night, "What I did not count on....is that he (Bush) had no intention to allow the inspectors to finish the job."

Now, as Gerth and Van Natta point out, the war resolution contained no directive for further UN inspections in Iraq. It left it to the president's discretion to determine if this approach was working, to assess Saddam Hussein's compliance, and to resort to invasion as an alternative.

Senator Carl Levin offered an amendment that would have required additional UN action and required the president, if the UN diplomacy failed, to return to congress for authorization for a unilateral war initiative.

But Clinton, who now claims that more diplomacy was key, voted against this. And, as the reporters go on, "Clinton has never publicly explained her vote against the Levin amendment or said why she stayed on the sidelines as 11 other senators debated it for 95 minutes that day." Continued...