Instead of debating Iraq, they choose to go after a political ad. A political ad has never killed anyone. Iraq has killed thousands. Now there is even more evidence that they should have done their job on debating Iraq. Today’s Washington Post has a front page article on how Petraeus did cook the books. He did go before Congress and lie about the numbers. He did betray us.

On Sept. 1, the bullet-riddled bodies of four Iraqi men were found on a Baghdad street. Two days later, a single dead man, with one bullet in his head, was found on a different street. According to the U.S. military in Iraq, the solitary man was a victim of sectarian violence. The first four were not.

Such determinations are the building blocks for what the Bush administration has declared a downward trend in sectarian deaths and a sign that its war strategy is working. They are made by a specialized team of soldiers who spend their nights at computer terminals, sifting through data on the day’s civilian victims for clues to the motivations of killers.

Now this is something that we have known about. The media has been reporting this variation in numbers for the past couple months. Now here is where it gets interesting:

Apparent contradictions are relatively easy to find in the flood of bar charts and trend lines the military produces. Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon’s latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by the top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, in his recent congressional testimony. Petraeus’s chart was limited to numbers of dead, while the Pentagon combined the numbers of dead and wounded — a figure that should be greater. Yet Petraeus’s numbers were higher than the Pentagon’s for the months preceding this year’s increase of U.S. troops to Iraq, and lower since U.S. operations escalated this summer.

Let’s put this in laymen terms. You started running the widget sales division of Acme this year. It is time to give the board a progress report on how sales are going. To make you look better to the board, you decide to report that less widgets were actually sold before you took over and then inflate the sales numbers during your reign.

How would the board treat you if they found out? Simple – you would be out of a job. This is the same that should happen with David Petraeus.

The Government Accounting Office is even having problems saying if violence is down or not:

In an Iraq assessment released this month, the Government Accountability Office said it “could not determine if sectarian violence had declined” since the U.S. troop buildup began in the spring and saw no decrease in overall attacks against civilians as of the end of July. The GAO recommended that the administration expand its statistical sources to include “all relevant U.S. agencies” and that it use “broader measures of population security” to establish trends. An unpublished, classified annex to its report listed the sources of differing agency opinions and provided more detail on the kinds of measurements the GAO thought should be included.

So Congress needs to tell the White House that there will be no more money until they are given factual data. I know the Republicans will try to kill this, but now is the time for politics. Harry Reid must show courage and make the Republicans filibuster. Let the cameras show them pulling in the roll-a-way beds and the Republicans trying to obstruct legislation on Iraq. It is simple – the people voted the Democrats in so we could see a change in Iraq. The Republicans are obstructing that, effectively punishing the voters for not voting for them. It is time for the Democrats to show the American people what traitors the Republicans are.