Botox is powerful stuff. It can make a man look decades younger. And apparently sound that way as well, as Senator Kerry reverted to his radical chic 1971 days yesterday on Face The Nation:

You've got to begin to transfer authority to the Iraqis. And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs. Whether you like it or not...

SCHIEFFER: Yeah.

Sen. KERRY: ...Iraqis should be doing that. And after all of these two and a half years, with all of the talk of 210,000 people trained, there just is no excuse for not transferring more of that authority.

Kerry thinks that the American soldiers are the terrorists in Iraq, applying that unique gift of his for moral relativity once again to indict an entire deployment of soldiers as criminals of the same order as our enemy. And Bob Schieffer sat there, without even raising an objection to Kerry's smear. Had Kerry not shown a long track record of this kind of rhetoric in the past -- and had to answer for it repeatedly during last year's presidential election -- one could possibly believe it came out as a slip of the tongue. However, he obviously has never stopped believing that the American fighting man and woman represents the same relative evil as the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, and al-Qaeda.

The Democrats need to answer for this outrage. Is it really the party position that American soldiers terrorize Iraqi civilians? Do they want the Iraqis to do it instead of us? Kerry has unmasked himself and his fellow anti-war zealots for the hypocrites they are.

Update: Jeff Goldstein discovers the checklist that Kerry is working from.

Another Update: James Taranto writes, "The old proverb is right: A haughty, French-looking Massachusetts leopard who by the way served in Vietnam doesn't change its spots.":

Terrorizing kids and children and breaking sort of the customs! Didn't "Jenjis Khan" used to do stuff like that in Vietnam? Note, too, that Kerry isn't against this per se; he just thinks Iraqis should be doing it. It's highly reminiscent of Vietnam, only back then Kerry's words carried some weight because he sold himself as a veteran against the war, whereas now he's just the junior senator from Massachusetts.