Now this is the way to respond to the questions of your constituents and supporters.  As you no doubt recall, Babaloo wrote a piece for us last Thursday asking for some clarification from Rep. Jerry McNerney on some public statements that seemed to indicate that he had changed his position on Iraq. 

Howie has Rep. McNerney’s response, and I wanted to be certain that all of you saw it:

I am firmly in favor of withdrawing troops on a timeline that includes both a definite start date and a definite end date (“date certain”) and uses clearly-defined benchmarks. I am not in favor of an “open-ended” timeline for withdrawal, as some members of Congress have proposed recently.

Jerry urged Americans to carefully read The War As We Saw It, an Op-Ed that appeared in Sunday’s NY Times, written by 7 military men stationed in Iraq which puts all the Bush Regime propaganda efforts to the lie.

Jerry’s blog has his full explanation and he sent the following note to the Blue America community:

Thank you to everyone at FDL, Crooks & Liars and DWT for always taking the time to let me know your concerns about Iraq and many of the other difficult issues facing us as Americans. You stood behind me when I ran for Congress against Richard Pombo and I hope you’ll stand behind me now as the debate on the war heats up again in Congress.

As soon as I get a chance, I would enjoy live-blogging again with all of you and Howie on Blue America. In the meantime, if you have thoughts you would like to share with me and our community, please post a comment on my blog or privately to the “Contact Us” section of our campaign web site.

Great work from Howie and Babaloo in pushing this discussion forward — and a big thank you to all of you who contacted McNerney’s office asking for clarification.  We look forward to further discussions with Rep. McNerney, and applaud his quick, forthright and thoughtful response on this.

Unlike the dodge and phony show that we’ve seen from Rep. Chris Carney, Rep. Jerry McNerney shows that a little honesty and some real conversation go a long, long way when dealing with the folks who helped put you in office in the first place.  It’s called public accountability.  Thanks to Rep. McNerney for the follow-up on this — it’s awfully nice to deal with a grown-up response for a change.

And in case you missed this, Chris Bowers has an accountability knocks moment for Mr. Carney….

(Photo from left to right, Howie Klein and Jerry McNerney.)