UPDATE: Firedoglake reports on 3/15 that Hillary wants us to rule Iraq as a colonial power indefinitely. Okay, they don't say colonial, but I do.

 

Hillary Clinton thinks I am her friend. At least that's how she addressed a letter to me the other day. "Dear Friend," it said.

I have no idea how she got my address (perhaps she bought a subscription database from some magazine, or maybe Russ Feingold gave her a list). I really don't want any mail from her either.

But since Hillary thinks we're buddy-buddy, and she asked me what was important, I was honest with her. On the lines her campaign staff provided for comment, I wrote that she needs to renounce her support for the Iraq war, that Bush needs to be impeached, and that AIPAC's dominance over Israel-Palestine-US policy demands to be challenged.

I sent her a small campaign contribution in the hopes that my thoughts will be taken more seriously because of it. But for some reason, I don't think I can compete with the big money.

Nevertheless, what she writes about in her two page letter is telling.

"There is always a lot at stake when America chooses a new president," she opens her letter with. "But there has never been more hanging in the balance than now.

"Election Day can only bring the deep and fundamental changes our country needs if we work our hearts out every day between now and then," she says at the close of the first graf.

God, I want to believe her. I know that the real work of democracy happens in between elections. I know that our country needs deep and fundamental change.

But she brings up World War II (her father was a veteran) before touching on the Iraq War (which she voted for in 2002). In the tenth paragraph, she (or more likely a well-paid campaign staffer with years of training and experience in political fundraising) writes:

"I believe that if we work together, with a bold, can-do spirit that is America at our best, we can develop a coherent Iraq strategy and redeploy our troops and repair our alliances so we can fight terrorism together."

Hillary, my friend, when Nebraska's Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel is calling for withdrawal and impeachment, your rhetoric is stale, centrist and not going to win me over. You are positioning the war in Iraq like a Bush, as part of the larger war on terror.

Can we have a politician who will renounce waging war on nouns? Please?

I want to like her. I want a female president. Israel, India, Sweden, Germany and even Great Britain have all elected women as chief executives. We have eight female governors (nine if you count Puerto Rico's), but none have the name recognition Hillary does.

Is there another woman who is known by first name in the country who has the political will and support to win? Not likely. And her letter certainly positions her credentials as a modern day suffragette.

"All my life I have fought to give women a choice - in their careers, with their families, and in their personal lives," she says in the letter, and later touches on her "standing up to the Chinese in Beijing and proclaiming that women's rights are human rights."

I always figured that the first female president would be anti-war, which Hillary certainly is not.

Will it be a step forward for America if she is president? Probably (which is a painful admission for me, because I really don't like her or any of the other Democrats in the field).

And the concept of having either a Bush or a Clinton in the executive branch of the U.S. government from 1988 to 2012 (and maybe 2016), between 24 and 28 years, is not good for our country.

But then again, I thought George Bush would be just a bad president.