Kerry To "Tell It Like It Is" About Bush's War

Newsweek is claiming that John Kerry has taken a deep breath and decided he's got to hit Bush on the Iraq War -- from now on through November 2nd. Helping out with that decision was General Wesley Clark, whom we're so glad to see still on the Kerry team:
"...before he spoke to the National Guard convention in Las Vegas, Kerry sought the advice of yet another sounding board on his plane: former four-star general Wes Clark. Kerry knew from Vietnam what it felt like to face the bullets without the support of the folks back home. So how, one of his senior staff wanted to know, would Kerry's attacks go down now with the troops in Iraq? 'Look, the soldiers are debating it themselves on the ground,' Clark reassured Kerry's inner circle. 'They're coming back and they're incredibly critical. You have to call it like it is.' "

One of those Iraqi veterans walked into the local Democrat Party HDQ in Boone a week or so ago -- young man, wounded but ambulatory, telling tales about the crashing morale among troops over there who have begun to feel like the pawns they surely are for this neoconservative foreign adverturism. "Don't you believe for a minute that the troops are gonna vote for Bush!" the young man said. "Some of them are. But many won't."

That is, if they can get their hands on an absentee ballot. You've got to be incredibly focused and task-oriented these days to get an absentee ballot -- under ideal circumstances far removed from being shot at on a battlefield.

But back to Newsweek's story about Kerry deciding to go after Bush for lying, from start to finish, about this war: "Not so long ago, Kerry's strategists planned to spend the fall talking about the economy and health care, thinking they had proved their candidate's national-security credentials in Boston. They also planned to stay positive, shunning political attacks in the belief that slime could alienate swing voters. But that was before Kerry's August swoon, and an influx of fresh faces -- a mix of Boston loyalists and Clintonites -- at the top of the Democrat's team. Their main job is to keep Kerry on message and sharpen his attack on Bush. While Kerry will continue to hit at the Democrats' traditional pocketbook issues, his new strategists have embraced Clark's advice to tell it like it is."

If we were wearing a hat, we'd have thrown it into the air by now, and whooped.