This was something I can’t defend. It is disgusting to me. Why did they do it? Anyway, I wrote this letter to the 22 Democratic signees:
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But thanks to 22 Democratic clowns joining a Republican circus, the Senate was able to break the partisan impasse by overwhelmingly passing one bold measure: A defense of Gen. David Petraeus against a MoveOn.org newspaper ad.

The resolution expressed “full support” for the general and condemned “personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.”

Cable news networks that cheer-led our country into invading Iraq took a break from their latest all-O.J.-all-the-time binge to make an antiwar ad more controversial than the ongoing slaughter of Iraqis and Americans that the invasion predictably unleashed.

And 22 Democrats were more desperate to distance themselves from the 3-million-member MoveOn than from less than 50 Republican dead-enders bent on prolonging the killing.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/22/4031/
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SHAME ON YOU!!!!

I am definately not a left wing radical anti-war zealot. I am, however a Democrat that has continuously covered the behinds and defended our Dem leaders in congress in letters to congress and on many many blogs and message boards. Friday, 22 of you did the undefendable this time.

HOW COULD YOU???? Walk the repub party line???? What exactly did moveon ever do you? What questions did they ask in that ad that wasn’t on the minds of us all? How can you continue to allow the repubs to bully you?

Betrayus did exactly that. He crawled in bed with the neo-cons and lied. I have watched everyday the growing list of dead Iraqis and US troops. We have lost more than any of the previous years.

The violence is down? In Baghdad? The security has made what changes in the political climate?

No matter who is in the majority in congress it is still the same old game. I have tried to forget that we were the majority when we invaded Iraq, but the dem congress goes right back to letting the repubs run the policies no matter who is the majority.

I am ashamed to call myself a Democrat after 42 years of voting dem.

You couldn’t get a bill passed that gave health insurance, one that reinstated habeus corpus, or one that provided our troops needed home time, but you helped the repubs by signing on to a non-binding bill suppressing the help the Dem congress needs to bring out the truth, the main stream media’s blitz for continuing this war until the corporations can control ALL of Iraq.
In passing that bill you helped cover the truth and blocked exposing the bushco’s lies.

Forget the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis men women and children, the deaths of almost 3800 US troops and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, in and out of Iraq, the diseases caused by witholding purifications for their drinking water (cholera for one), 120-130 degree heat with no electricity.

Katrina and the handling of the aftermath should have given us at least a tiny fraction of understanding of what Iraqis have been going through everyday for over 4 years. 3000 dead on 9/11 should have given us a tiny understanding of what hundreds of thousand of Iraqi deaths is doing to Iraq. A people that never did anything to us.

The Democratic congress should stop listening to repubs and Lieberman and the main stream media and start using their heads and listen to their constituants….’we the people’.

I will still vote in 08, but more and more dems are saying that they will not.

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The 22 Democrats can be reached by dialing the Congressional switchboard: 202-224-3121. They are Baucus (MT), Bayh (IN), Cardin (MD), Carper (DE), Casey (PA), Conrad (ND), Dorgan (ND), Feinstein (CA), Johnson (SD), Klobuchar (MN), Kohl (WI), Landrieu (LA), Leahy (VT), Lincoln (AR), McCaskill (MO), Mikulski (MD), Nelson (FL), Nelson (NE), Pryor (AR), Salazar (CO), Tester (MT) and Webb (VA).

Neither is the fact that “alleged” american methods of determining what is counted as an executions is irrelvant, because they’ve outsourced the job of counting executions to iraqis. Given the bang up job the Iraqis are doing of about every other political task we give them, I think its fair to be skeptical…

Funny to see you practicing the selective thin-skinnedness you find so recherche in other contexts, Ex. I’m sure General Dave is a burly enough man’s man to withstand ink and paper, aren’t you?

Perhaps your outrage would be better directed at the “Commander-Guy” who ordered his General to play Press Secretary. Everyone knows cute blondes are a better choice for that duty, right?

Guess it goes to show that even the most resolute of “warriors” grasps for straws at the ebb of his strength.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/icd-methodology/

‘Pony up your so-called “documents” from TPM please so everyone can see.’

Ummmm…Veritas…The link to the MNF-I documents are provided right in the article ThinkProgress summary above:

“Check out Spencer’s rundown here and the actual documents here.”

Just click and read, Veritas….It’s not complicated.

Wow.

Putting one rumor to rest: there is no consideration given to the placement of an entry wound on a murder suspect’s head in the tabulation of sectarian violence, contrary to a Washington Post report earlier this month.

I have no direct knowlege of this ” bullet entry controversy”, but assuming the Washington Post was wrong about the “placement of an entry wound” being a consideration, I think we should stop citing it. There is plenty of correct evidence that Bush has made a mess of the War in Iraq. Why give the Bush supporters a club to hit us over the head with?
Scrupulous concern for the truth should be a hallmark of the anti-war effort.

Comment by Heymack

The GOP didn’t “abandon their base;” rather, they were just demonstrating that conservatism is, and always was, a scam perpetrated on the American people. Reagan was as high-spending as Bush, yet “conservatives” revere Ronny, while castigating Bush. When Reagan left office, conservatives thought him just short of saintly – even though he trashed conservative principles every bit as much as Bush. The difference was that then, they could write off Reagan’s conservative apostasy as an anomaly, while Bush’s “unconservative” rule is seen a confirmation that conservatism is simply a scam, perpetrated on those steely-eyed believers of Adam Smith. So they must vocally try to distance themselves, or risk the truth becoming more widely known: conservatism is a scam, perpetrated on the weak-minded.

Fast forward to 2007 in Iraq, where we now calculate the entry point of the bullet into the victim to measure our “success.” We are seeing progress, don’t you know? Gen. BetrayUs told us so and now we know where he got his “facts & figures.” MoveOn was right. This man’s “testimony” (not sworn in), as Bush’s shill, was a betrayal of our nation and our troops on the ground in Iraq.

Actually, Greenspan did “say a word”. He ENDORSED Bush’s tax cuts for the very wealthy. Why he is now saying he was opposed to the tax cuts is beyond me. It looks like another Bush sycophant trying to clean up their legacy. Sorry Greenspan, the stain of your endorsing Bush and participation in the sub-prime mortgage debacle will go down in history with you. Nothing you can do to change it.

Excuse me, I actually meant “to provide execution numbers” not “to verify execution numbers”… the united states just took the iraq stats for executions at their word, without doing any independent verification that these numbers were accurate, or that they were using identical criteria
to define execution…how convenient… Id LOVE see the arabic document that instructs Iraqis on how to define “execution” in order for it to jive with our definition…. Exley, maybe you can do a FOIA request and see if it exists…i’ll bet you 100$ it doesnt… want to bet?

Also, is this the exact same methodology that was being used in earlier years? if not, its totally irrlevant in any case.. apples and oranges…

I became livid this week over the 2 request’s for money by the Dem’s..The first one came from..Off the table Nancy and the second from Albright…I plan to send out my second notice to Ms.Albright just as I did the one to Nancy…”Don’t dunn me for fund’s untill you do your job”..Put impeachment back on the table and stop playing nice with bush, people are dieing while you all play polatics..You will get no fund’s from me or my vote’s untill you all grow a spine…..As alway’s it will do no good but I will continue untill it doe’s.

This entire war thing is madening, we are supplying both side’s against our own…The only one’s benefiting are the war monger’s, manufacturing friend’s and big oil..Every one else is becoming a casuelty…War’s and relegion are big business…Any one who believes this bush war was (not) planned before he and cheney ran for office is slow witted…

Squeing all the death number’s is a pathetic attemp that countless time’s has worked with this evil bunch in office, my guess is there are thousand’s more of our own that are no correctly counted..Read some where our losses were beyond 8,000 several month’s ago..Have also read there are 40,000 that are AWOL…Don’t have any fact’s to back those number’s up but would guess from all the breaking military number’s on death’s of Iraq’s being way low that there is a strong possability we will find out when these happy war monger’s leave office all their number’s will be lie’s….Thank you all for your great post’s….Blessings

Yes…. interestingly enough, these guys dont meet two of the five requirements our government says you have to have to be afforded the legal status of a lawful combatant.

1) They dont wear uniforms

2) They arent regulated by any form of military justice.

Ergo, by the united states own logic, they are unlawful combatants. They have no more rights than any insurgent or terrorist who doesnt wear a uniform.

All those movies depicting lawlessness and mayhem in the future may be more prescient than they thought.

Aaah… this is rich, coming from a staunch supporter of an administration with no class, or decency whatsoever.

Pray, tell us, Exley: How decent is it to invade a country that poses no threat? How much class do you find in an administration that has sunk (and lost, without making anyone acountable) billions of dollars into the Iraqi black hole?

After all these years of being mislead, deceived, lied to, you are still as pigheaded as ever.

No problem…these guys are scumbags, and I hope I get a chance to be involved as a lawyer in a lawsuit against them someday.

Looking at this methodology document, I highly suspect its been altered since all the heat about kooky methodology reporting game down.

take a look at the bottom of this page:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/icd-methodology/?resultpage=3&

Executions: …”shot anywhere in the head”……

now answer me this…if this document was made BEFORE the wapo claims that location of headshot mattered…why would they go out of thier way to stress “anywhere in the head”? …why not just “shot in the head”? Why would the specific locality of the headshot matter unless it had already been raised as an embarassing methodology? Strangely, this is the only method of death that they go into such inexplicably painful detail to explain..

And in any case, exley, learn to read. Once again, your seeing what you want to see. They relied SOLELY on the honesty of the iraqi government to verify execution numbers. So therefore, the United States definition of “execution” is irrelevant…if the iraq government decides to only count people shot in the back of the head…well….I guess thats the criteria used.

Are you willing to vouch for the honesty and consistencey of the iraqi government?

Iraqi and United States officials sure arent working under the same definition of “blackwater has to leave”, because the united states completely ignored the iraqis statement that blackwater was banned and had to leave.

If you have any documentation of a single blackwater operative leaving iraq when the iraqis told them to, I’d love to see it.

Oh, and car bomb deaths only count if the death is of a person who belongs
to a different sect than the alleged bomber. Also, they dont count attacks on government officals as “sectarian”, only attacks on civilians. So there are some rather stunningly broad omissions in these numbers, by any stretch of the imagination.

Exley, you think thier was any good reason a decent, upstanding man like Betrayus wouldnt take an oath to tell the truth before his testimony, just like almost everyone who testifies before congress does? You do know that sworn testimony is generally found to be more credible than unsworn testimony, right? Its why everyone who tesifies in a court of law has to take an oath to tell the truth.

In fact, Betrayus is such a noble man, I’m surprised he didnt insist he take an oath, to show how interested in telling the truth he was…