Let me finish with this.
Personally, I find the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, which he declared Tuesday, something to look forward to.
I’m speaking as someone who loves the romance of politics. Because in addition to duking it out over important issues, I think the personal is a big part of politics, especially in this country where we tend to want to know the president in some sort of one-to-one connection. We pick the president, after all, not like they do in other countries where the members of parliament pick the prime ministers.
So the personal matters.
I have a tougher, a harder reason, to root for Senator Sanders in this fight. I’d like to have the Democrats never forget why they have the White House today. They have it because they ran a candidate who opposed the stupidity and horror of the Iraq War.
That war was sold to the American people on a fact that wasn’t a fact, a claim that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons. He didn’t and that is something people with a conscience will have to live with.
Anyone who goes into this presidential election with a mind that hasn’t fully absorbed this fact of deceit should not be running. They are either too stubborn or too stupid or too ideological or too personally desperate to accept the truth.
The truth is we were taken last time, as Senator Sanders has made clear. Taken by a president lacking the intellectual heft to serve, a vice president driven by a determination to kill and by ideologues so gung-ho to send our kids into battle they should not be allowed near a keyboard again, a keyboard being their primary means of battle.
We’ve had too many wars, too many days and nights of killing Islamic people on global television, too many people whose instinct is to exploit their positions to pursue their ideological madness.
Chris Matthews