You’re welcome to vote for Hillary Clinton and feel good about it. I may vote for her too, but I’ll feel bad about it for a number of reasons. Lately I’ve been most concerned about her arms sales as Secretary of State to the Middle East, which look to have been influenced by donations to the Clinton Foundation. But you brought back memories of the Iraq War vote.

What “smart” people made shitty decisions based on Bush’s propaganda? This one didn’t. You can’t have it both ways. Hillary can’t be this super-smart, super-competent, most prepared person ever to be president, and yet have gotten it wrong on WMD. All the evidence to make a good decision was there. She got duped by a garden-variety drunk from Texas.

You need industrial complexes, preferably several of them and preferably on the scale of small cities, to make nuclear weapons. We built small cities in the U.S. to build our first nuclear weapons. There is no way it was being done in Iraq the back of somebody’s garage. It is a complicated, large-scale endeavor. Iraq was overrun with U.N. inspectors. I’ve worked on nuclear issues for years. I understand that someone who hasn’t worked on nuclear issues gets a pass for not knowing what it takes to build a nuke. But Hillary? What did she have that was more important to worry about? Why didn’t she know it was impossible for Iraq to be developing nukes? Was she missing the study guide, the Cliff’s notes version? She had to have it explained to her, and she took their word for it? That passes for super-competence?

The chemical weapons argument was even more ridiculous. The only chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein possibly had were a couple of rusting barrels of material that WE sold him. We still, in 2016, have orders of magnitude more chemical weapons stored on U.S. soil than he was ever accused of having.

Maybe George Bush didn’t dupe Hillary. Maybe she knew the WMD thing was bull, and voted for the war anyway. That’s worse. The only payoff for her was political ambition. Absolutely inexcusable. People do make brave decisions. They do things like sign the Emancipation Proclamation, regardless of the consequences. Hillary doesn’t get a pass because, “Oh! The people of New York would never have forgiven her!” Do the right thing.

I’m no fan of Trump, and like I say, I’ve swallowed my pride and come around to the idea of voting for Hillary. But I don’t see any way to justify voting for her except in the context of who she is running against. Her campaign knows this too, which is why their only refrain now is, “She’s not the other guy.”