Last weekend, Hillary told me that I should look elsewhere for a candidate to vote for.

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

That was nice of her, and I promptly took her up on her generous offer. But, alas, it doesn't end there. The war in Iraq is of such import, that it's important we continue to swat aside efforts from pro-war Democrats to pretend that unsavory episode never happened.

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers have been split for some time about whether she would be better off if she apologized for the vote. Mark Penn, her chief strategist, who was also Mr. Clinton’s pollster, carries considerable influence within the campaign, and he agrees with her that she should keep the “mistake” onus on Mr. Bush and turn her attention to finding “the right end” to the war, as she says. Foreign policy advisers say they have made similar arguments: look to the future, not the past, and stand by a vote that was based on military intelligence that was widely accepted at the time.

The "mistake" onus is obviously on Bush, but also on everyone that helped make it happen. And Hillary's vote (along with every other Democrat who went along to look "tough") didn't just enable Bush, but it also fueled efforts to marginalize and mock those of us fighting Bush's war. If even the liberal Hillary Clinton supported Bush's war, then those of us opposing it had to be real wackos way outside the mainstream!

We might not be talking about finding the "right end" to the war if she hadn't helped make it a reality in the first place.

Over the next year many of us will try to determine who can best lead us in this time of great strife. And part of being a good leader is 1) exhibiting good judgment on issues of great import, and 2) being able to acknowledge mistakes and adjust accordingly to minimize the damage.

And on this, Hillary has come up far short. While 23 Senators and lots more House Reps saw through the administration's smokescreen and refused to authorize Bush's war (and anyone who voted for Bush's authorization knew damn well it was a carte blanche for him to invade, no matter how many promises he gave about the UN yadda yadda yadda), Hillary was one of those who did.

Now many who voted for the war authorization, most Democrats and even some Republicans (including Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones) have acknowledged the mistake. But Hillary refuses to do so.

So we have a top-tier Democratic candidate for the presidency who showed abysmal judgment on the biggest issue to face our nation in decades, and then has refused to acknowledged her role in helping to make it happen.

That's straight from the "George Bush" style of leadership. And if there's one thing this country had learned, it's that we can't afford another one of those.