The irony in the slogan of the campaign is rich. For this is how history is actually written of late; Memes are echoed between mass media, blogs, left-wing activists, and back again, both here and abroad. The death tolls in the Iraq ad, for example, are nothing you don’t see every day on sites like DailyKos and FireDogLake. And they are monstrously false, both in the implied premise and the actual numbers. The idea that you can even compare the number of deaths at the hands of a monster and the number of deaths cost in freeing people from those hands is absurd. If Hitler’s death camps cost fewer lives than the war to destroy them, then let them stand? Nonsense.

But in this case, the numbers aren’t remotely accurate. How about the million plus who died in the Iran-Iraq war? How do they even calculate which deaths count and which do not? Does blowing yourself up get you on the list? How about fighting as an insurgent? Or how about the comparison of Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima? They drop an entire war from history just to make a point.