Obama was not Running for US Senate in 2002!

Excerpt]First, let’s go to a claim BO made in his last debate with Hillary Clinton:

SEN. CLINTON: […] And every time the question about qualifications and credentials for commander in chief are raised, Senator Obama rightly points to the speech he gave in 2002. He’s to be commended for having given the speech. Many people gave speeches against the war then, and the fair comparison is he didn’t have responsibility, he didn’t have to vote; by 2004 he was saying that he basically agreed with the way George Bush was conducting the war. And when he came to the Senate, he and I have voted exactly the same. We have voted for the money to fund the war until relatively recently. So the fair comparison was when we both had responsibility, when it wasn’t just a speech but it was actually action, where is the difference? Where is the comparison that would in some way give a real credibility to the speech that he gave against the war?

SEN. OBAMA: Let me just follow up. My objections to the war in Iraq were simply — not simply a speech. I was in the midst of a U.S. Senate campaign. It was a high-stakes campaign. I was one of the most vocal opponents of the war, and I was very specific as to why.

Bzzzt. Wrong. Senator Obama gave his speech in October of 2002. He didn’t announce his candidacy for the US Senate until January 2003, and it wasn’t considered “high stakes” once his two toughest opponents were bumped out of the race due to marital scandals.

Something else he’s asserted about his Iraq war speech that is just flat out wrong: that it was took “courage” to give it. Watch one of the latest ads his campaign has run about the “courage” it took for him to oppose the Iraq war “from the start”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=879o1_pxO0c

I’m sorry, but can someone explain to me how it took “courage” for then-state Senator Obama to make a speech against the Iraq war, at a time when he wasn’t in the US Senate, and wasn’t privy to the intelligence others in the Senate had at their disposal? In fact, the speech he made in October 2002 was made at an anti-Iraq war rally. This is “courage”? Yeah, it’s about as courageous as it is to wade in a kiddie pool wearing a life jacket.

Something else that ad asserted was that BO understood that the “real threat” to the US was AQ in Afghanistan … yet he couldn’t manage to hold a single policy hearing last year on Afghanistan after he became Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on European Affairs?

http://sistertoldjah.com/archives/2008/03/03/todays-barack-obama-digest/