George Clooney

Hollywood's George Clooney is making no apologies for being a political liberal.

"Yes, I'm a liberal and I'm sick of it being a bad word," the actor-director tells the Sunday Times of London.

"I don't know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues. We thought that blacks should sit at the front of the bus, that women should be allowed to vote, that maybe McCarthy was a jerk, that Vietnam was wrong and strip-bombing Cambodia was probably stupid. We've been on the right side of all these issues."

Clooney, who sees himself as an "irritant," says he's disappointed with the Democratic Party for failing to stand up against President Bush in the days before the Iraq war.

"The Democrats were scared on Iraq and the truth is they backed themselves into a corner," he said. "They didn't have the political resolve to tough it out and now they are paying the price."

When asked about Sen. Hillary Clinton's attempts to distance herself from her past support of the president, Clooney said:

"She's pretty political so I'm not surprised. Am I disappointed? Yeah. I hate it when smart men and women are saying, 'Well, if I knew then what I know now.' The fact is: I knew it then and I don't have national security clearance. I knew there was no tie between Saddam Hussein and 9-11. We all knew the U.N. inspectors wanted to keep looking for weapons of mass destruction. Basically, the Democrat leadership was scared (of criticizing Bush) and it's too bad, because it's come back to haunt them."

Clooney is also not jumping on the bandwagon of Mrs. Clinton, should she decide to run for the presidency in 2008, as he prefers Illinois Democrat Barack Obama.

"Of course he doesn't want to (run for president) right now; he just wants to be senator for Illinois," Clooney said. "But he could attract the two groups who rarely show up to vote ? young people and blacks. He's the guy to get behind."

Asked if he felt any sense of vindication that two years after he was denounced as a traitor, he says his doubts about the war have become mainstream: "You would feel some sense of vindication if 10 of our kids hadn't been killed the other day just outside Fallujah with a rocket-propelled grenade. You don't see any of us standing up going, 'Hey, hey, we were right.' There's nothing fun about being on the right side of history if the children of friends of mine are being killed.

"The truth is, you still have to ask questions. We do have Syria, Iran and North Korea. We've got a lot of other issues and we don't want to have to go into these with an (ideological) agenda, and then fake whatever information we need to back up our agenda again."

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