Democrat presidents misled and troops wound up dead?
That's what Sen. Barack Obama seemed to be saying in a wide ranging interview with the Chicago Tribune this week.
Commenting on claims that President Bush used on bogus intelligence to take America into the Iraq war - he noted that more than one Democratic president has done the same thing.
The revelation came as Sen. Obama recounted a recent town meeting where an audience member had asked him about the war, saying: "Shouldn't the president be impeached for lying?"
The top black Democrat recalled answering: "Well, FDR, JFK, LBJ -- we have a pretty long list of presidents who maybe were not entirely forthcoming with intelligence information before they went to war, so I'd be cautious against making legal cases against the administration."
Sen. Obama was apparently referring to longstanding allegations that FDR ignored intelligence that showed the Japanese planned to attack Pearl Harbor - knowing that such an attack would mobilize public opinion for a war against Nazi Germany.
In JFK and LBJ's case, he was apparently alluding to intelligence that was manipulated before the Vietnam War - such as Lyndon Johnson's claim that the North Vietnamese attacked US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Historians now say no such attack ever took place.
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