When ads attack

Let's get one thing straight. The moveon.org ad didn't kill more than 2,700 US troops in Iraq. It didn't injure the more than 27,000 others who left that country disabled. It didn't attract an active al qeda insurgency. It didn't mire the country in a civil war. It didn't cause acid rain, global warming and the decline of western civilization as we know it.

It doesn't even cause whiter teeth or fresh breath.

You'd think it did all those things if you listened to the rhetoric spewing from war supporters this week.

The left leaning activist organization and website with the same name, moveon.org this week took out a full-page ad in the New York Times where it mocked Gen. David Petraeus as Gen. Betray Us. MoveOn called it factual and sticky. But the political right came unglued.

Rudy Guliani, denounced it, while taking out his own ad. Republican candidates tripped over each other to portray the ad as a disrespectful attack on a good man...and the military. The fever pitch built this week to the point that the president felt the need to weigh in and a Democratic controlled Senate passed a resolution 72-25 expressing its outrage. Let me repeat that: a Democratic controlled Senate passed a resolution 72-25 expressing its outrage.

All this commotion for an ad? An ad?

This, my friends, is the politics of distraction. Having trouble defending the substance of the good general's testimony? Put the messenger in the cross hairs. His supporters seem to suggest that he is so thin skinned that any strident disagreement is over the line. A decorated general who is fighting in a war zone where sniping and road side bombs are the order of the day can't take a shot from an advertisement?

Gen. Petraeus is a public figure, not just reporting out on the state of affairs but making a recommendation on the path forward. He's lending his voice and expertise to a national debate on the future of our country. To the extent that he uses any facts or figures to back them up, they should be open to scrutiny. And if they don't hold up under scrutiny, then he ought to be prepared to have them called into question. And if it appears he is knowingly misleading the country, we ought to be able to point that out too. Even if it is in an ad.