I get the GOP Team Leader email of course, and here's what I got today:

...Then in his remarks Mr. Soros--the billionaire supporter of John Kerry and MoveOn.org--equated the attacks of September 11 to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse and went on to say, “The war on terror has taken more innocent victims than the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”

Unbelievable.

Abu Ghraib was bad and the soldiers involved are rightly being punished, but for Democrats to say that the abuse of Iraqi fighters is the moral equivalent of the slaughter of 3,000 innocent Americans is outrageous.

Leaving aside the smear that Soros morally equivocated Abu Ghraib and 9/11 (he didn't; he said they both produced shocking images), I'd like to focus on that middle paragraph.

Why is it unbelievable that more than 3,000 innocent people have been killed in our military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq? Is it unbelievable that we could have killed so many people, or that anyone would dare to say that we did?

I hate to let a little thing like math get in the way of a good zinger, but 9,284 > 3000. Oh, and don't forget the Afghanis.

So let's be clear here. Even if you think the lowball estimate from the IraqBodyCount is too high, you probably have to admit that when we spend about $200B over about three years killing people and blowing shit up, we end up with more than 3,000 unintented (read: innocent) deaths. So the numbers aren't unbelievable.

What is unbelievable then? It must be that someone would have the gall to point out that the underlying emotional motivation for our current military (mis)adventures -- vengance -- is completely morally bankrupt even from the most brutal perspective, which is scale. It's un-fucking-believable to the GOP that a man from the opposition party would get on stage and say, "Holy shit, this is so fucked up! Not only are we bombing the wrong fucking people, but we're killing 3 or 4 times as many innocent civilians as died in the attacks on our own country."

That, to them, is unbelievable. It's unbelievable that people in this country are willing to publicly state that we've killed (and are continuing to kill) more Iraqi and Afghani civilians than we lost here at home.

I've met decent people who vote Republicans. I've even heard of decent Republican office-holders. But this GOP apparatus is an enemy of truth, an enemy of logic, an enemy of compassion and rational thought. They've got to fucking go, and decent Republicans are going to realize this sooner or later. You cannot run a good political party on lies, racism and religious fervor.