I've written about hitting Bush on Iraq and recently, on Richard Clarke (the former Clinton and Bush top counterterrorism aide who is appearing on 60 Minutes tomorrow in what promises to be some tough words for Bush) and the importance of using his expressions regarding Bush, Rummy, 9/11, the War on Terror and the desire to invade Iraq in my previous diary entries -
http://armando.dailykos.com/
I'd like to expand on these points to emphasize the tremendous opportunity this presents for Kerry. Here is some analysis on the American public's view of Bush's performance on Iraq from Ruy Texiera-
"The Big Shift: How Public Opinion Has Changed on Iraq
It's the one year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. That makes it a very good time to review how public opinion on Iraq has evolved since the invasion, going from strong support to the question-laden, how-do-we-get-out-of-this-mess view that characterizes the public today.
CBS News has usefully summarized some of the relevant data in a report, "Shifting Opinions on Iraq". . . . Bush's approval rating on Iraq reached 79 percent after the fall of Baghdad. But in the latest CBS News poll, it's down to 49 percent, a decline of 30 points. . . ."
http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/
This is fertile ground. What is propping Bush up? The view that he is doing well on the War on Terror. We must shoot this down. Richard Clarke's appearances and book release provide us an opportunity to do this.
More from Ruy -
" . . . What happened? After all, the Iraq army was beaten in short order and in December Saddam Hussein was captured. But, as far as the public was concerned, Saddam's capture did little to remedy the three big problems with our occupation of Iraq: casualties, financial costs and WMD (the abundance of the first two and the lack of the third). It is these problems that have undercut--and continue to undercut--public support for the Iraq war and occupation. Therefore, since Saddam's capture clearly did not solve any of these problems--far from it--his capture, in the end, did little to change increasingly negative public views of the Iraq situation.
These negative views include the following. According to CBS News polls, a majority says "the result of the war with Iraq" was not worth "the loss of American life and other costs" (51 percent to 42 percent). A majority (55 percent) also believes that, as a result of the war with Iraq, the US is either less safe from terrorism (19 percent) or there has been no change (36 percent), rather than that we are safer from terrorism (42 percent). In addition, 61 percent say that the Bush administration was either hiding elements (45 percent) or mostly lying (16 percent) about what they knew about Iraq's WMD. The public also believes that the the Bush administration intentionally exaggerated intelligence findings to build support for the war (59 percent), rather than interpreted that intelligence accurately. . . ."
I've written often on how the Iraq Debacle has rendered significant damage to our critical global alliance in the War on Terror and thus done severe damage to the security of the nation. Check my diaries if you are interested.
How to get the message across? Clarke provides a way - explain that Iraq had nothing to do with the War on Terror, indeed has done damage to the War on Terror. Further explain that BushCo was more interested in the Iraq Debacle than the War on Terror - how do we know - because on 9/11, and 9/12, instead of wanting to get the bastards who killed our folk, Bush and Rummy wanted an excuse to invade Iraq. Clarke has the goods for this.
We need the will. In my view, if we can beat Bush on this, Kerry crushes him in November.