At last, a Republican turns honest on Iraq

Salon ($) picks up a report of a Minnesota Republican Representative who just turned. This looks big:

A congressman's surprise discovery: Iraq isn't going so well
Just last month, Rep. Gil Gutknecht, a Republican from Minnesota, was admonishing his colleagues to "give victory a chance" in Iraq. "Members," he said, "this is not the time to go wobbly."
Well, maybe that wasn't. But apparently this is.
Gutknecht is just back from a weekend in Baghdad, and he says that conditions there are "worse than I expected." His solution? The same one he opposed so vigorously just a month ago: Start bringing home some troops.
According to a report in the Mankato, Minn., Free Press -- no, we don't usually read it, but Raw Story does -- Gutknecht learned during his visit to Iraq that Baghdad is a "serious problem" and "worse today than it was three years ago." Another of Gutknecht's breaking-news discoveries: "We learned it's not safe to go anywhere outside of the Green Zone any part of the day."
It shouldn't take a trip to Baghdad to learn these things; anyone reading any reputable newspaper over the past year would have already known everything that Gutknecht just found out. So why didn't he? Gutknecht says he has been at the receiving end of faulty "spin" from the Bush administration, including claims that the violence in Iraq was being caused by just a few hundred insurgents. "All of the information we receive sometimes from the Pentagon and the State Department isn’t always true," he says.
Well, good morning and welcome to the show.

There are a lot of cheerleaders, Republicans in particular, who need to think, and take themselves to the woodshed. Political suicide? Well, it should be. So many of them are such warriors with other families’ kids. Well, wouldn’t Samurai warriors commit political hara kiri at a minimum for blunders so monumental? Where is the honor?