Hillary Clinton says Bush “Mismanaged the Mismanagement of the War.”

Senator Hillary Clinton, D-NY, commenting on the exceedingly large turnout in today’s Iraqi elections, had harsh criticism for President Bush.

Everything was going according to plan. The President was mismanaging the war in Iraq. His approval ratings were low. Democrats were on the verge of regaining power. Now, suddenly, this happens. Iraqis have turned out to vote in huge numbers. Within a few weeks we will have the election results, and Iraq’s first democratically elected government will be in place.

... It has now become clear that the President has seriously mismanaged the mismanagement of the war.

Senator John Kerry, D-MA, suggested that the war was never being properly mismanaged in the first place.

The reality is that he misled us into believing he was mismanaging the war. Sure, I believed that things were going badly; we all did, but the truth is I would never have believed that if I would have had all the information available to me that the President had. And now that a democracy has been established in Iraq, let me just remind you that I was actually for this war before I was against it.

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, who recently commented on a San Antonio radio show that “The idea that we’re going to win the war in Iraq is just plain wrong,” says that his comment was based on information that had been “cherry-picked” by the Bush administration.

I think the president owes democrats an explanation. He cherry-picked the information coming out of Iraq, making it look as though we had no chance to win. Now we see 10 million Iraqis voting in a free election with very little violence. What's up with that?

... It's now obvious that it's been for purely political reasons that the President has stubbornly refused to withdraw troops from Iraq. If this Iraqi election leads to a free and secure democracy in Iraq, Republicans will continue winning elections in this country and will maintain their hold on power. I hate Republicans.