"Hillary" means never having to say you're sorry

I loathe reflexive Hillary-bashers, and if she wins the Democratic nomination, I'll vote for her; but this is part of the problem...

Tim Grieve, in Salon:

As transcripts show, Sen. Clinton's views on the war have slowly changed since 2002, but she still can't say her own vote to authorize force was a mistake....

Her public statements since October 2002 reflect a slow, relatively steady evolution in her thinking -- or at least in her talking points. She has gone from 1) voting for the use-of-force resolution, to 2) questioning the intelligence that formed the basis of that vote, to 3) arguing that the Bush administration distorted the intelligence, to 4) saying she didn't regret giving Bush authority to use force but did regret the way he used that authority, to 5) saying the resolution never would have come to a vote if Congress knew then what it knows now, to 6) saying that Congress wouldn't have voted for the resolution if Congress knew then what it knows now, to 7) saying that she wouldn't have voted for the resolution if she knew then what she knows now.

That's a lot of small steps, but Clinton remains either unable or unwilling to take the final one: To say not just that she would have voted differently if she knew then what she knows now but that she should have voted differently based on what she knew then. Clinton has said many, many words in her evolution. "Mistake" -- at least when it come to describing her own vote -- still hasn't been one of them.