Bill Clinton on the campaign trail

Bill Clinton is another person who has apparently forgotten about the powers of google. When he made the claim that he'd always been against the war in Iraq did he think that no one was going to look up his past statements?

True, he thought the invasion was launched prematurely, and said so at the time. But he never disputed the wisdom of Bush's decision to use military force.

For the record, then, here's what Clinton really had to say about the Iraq war.

"We've got the power, we've got the juice. We should do the job," he told students at the University of Florida in an April 2003 speech.

Later that month, Clinton declared in St. Louis: "Saddam is gone and good riddance" - adding: "Bush has done the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein from power."

And just days after Bush's controversial State of the Union Address that year, Clinton said: "It is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted-for stocks of biological and chemical weapons."

What's more, Bill Clinton made a direct link between 9/11 and Iraq: In a 2004 Time interview, the former president stressed that because of 9/11, Bush had an obligation to move against Saddam:

"That's why I supported the Iraq thing," he said. "There was a lot of [weapons] stuff unaccounted for . . . When you're the president, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for."

Clinton's aides now insist that he really did oppose the war - his public statements notwithstanding - but considered it inappropriate to publicly go against a sitting president.

Well, if that is what he thought, why go out publicly and state his support for the invasion? He could have just remained quiet. And if it was so wise to not go against a sitting president what about all his campaigning against a sitting president in 2004, 2006, and this year?

The funniest coverage of Clinton's campaigning comes from Ron Fournier of the Associated Press who points out how sometimes Bill is on top of the game and other times...not so much.

In the next 10 minutes, he used the word "I" a total of 94 times and mentioned "Hillary" just seven times in an address that was as much about his legacy as it was about his wife's candidacy.

He told the crowd where he bought coffee that morning and where he ate breakfast.

He detailed his Thanksgiving Day guest list, and menu.

He defended his record as president, rewriting history along the way.

And he explained why his endorsement of a certain senator from New York should matter to people.

"I know what it takes to be president," he said, "and because of the life I've led since I've left office."

I, me and my. Oh, my.

Late in his 50-minute address, Clinton told the crowd that wealthy people like he and his wife should pay more taxes in times of war. "Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers," he said.

In truth, Clinton did not oppose the Iraq war from the start — at least not publicly.

If the former president secretly opposed the war but did not want to speak against a sitting president (as some of his aides now claim), what moral authority does he have now? And did he share his objections with his wife? She started out as a hawkish Democrat but is now appealing to anti-war voters.

Just try to use the first person 94 times in 10 minutes. That's over 9 times a minutes. You have to work at it to be that self-absorbed. It's all about the big guy. Do the American people really want to hear four or eight years of this guy talking about himself?

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has more on what Clinton said earlier about the war. He was quite vocal about his support for the war - including a vociferous statement from just a year ago.

Asurprise guest at the meeting was Bill Clinton, whose agenda seemed to be protecting his wife. But things didn't work out quite as planned. When Guy Saperstein, a retired lawyer from Oakland, asked Clinton if Democrats who supported the war should apologize, the former President "went fucking ballistic," according to Saperstein. Forget Hillary, Clinton said angrily during a ten-minute rant; if I was in Congress I would've voted for the war. "It was an extraordinary display of anger and imperiousness," Saperstein says.

As Morrissey says,

It's not the equivocation that has people squirming; it's the ease with which Bill Clinton can issue flat-out lies. In fact, the fact that he issues such researchable and exposable lies and still has the chutzpah to use them on the stump that may worry people most of all. Does he really think that the media will allow those statements to go unchallenged?

The pattern here is really unmistakable. In the early days of the war, Bill had no problem climbing onto the Bush bandwagon, claiming support for the war. Now that it has proven as unpopular as it is, Bill wants to rewrite history and claim that he always opposed it, despite his record of public support. He will say anything to match up with the public sentiment of the moment, showing himself as a man completely without reliable principles.

That's the problem for Hillary, who almost completely lacks his campaigning skills and needs his assistance in connecting to voters. Her reliance on his campaigning winds up associating herself with his lack of honesty and credibility. When his slickness combines with her high negatives, Democrats should consider the likely result -- a general-election disaster.

As a Republican, I don't look forward to a constant drip drip about less than savory stories from Giuliani's past, I would think that Democrats must squirm in anticipation of similar stories about Bill and Hill.