This is politics at its worst: Yesterday the Senate wasted time voting on an amendment condemning the MoveOn.org ad that referred to General Petraeus as "General BetrayUs." The statement of purpose read:

To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.

It passed 72-25, and now many right wing pundits and bloggers (I'm not going to do them a favor by linking to them) are using the vote to accuse Democrats who voted against it of being unpatriotic, not supporting the troops, etc. And extremists on the left are doing something similar, attacking Obama for skipping the vote and failing to support MoveOn.

Good for Obama. This amendment was designed to be a political wedge. Passing it will not help the situation in Iraq and it will not help Petraeus do his job better. It was introduced to turn the discussion about Iraq from substantive issues about success and failure to a meaningless argument about who supports the troops more.

This is why Congress has an approval rating of 11%, lower than Bush's. We're not paying them to waste time setting political traps. They're unable to collectively pass a bill restoring habeus corpus, but they can pass this garbage?

And the kicker? It seems that the "General BetrayUs" nickname came from the troops themselves, rather than MoveOn. Petraeus started out as "Colonel BetrayUs" before he was promoted.

UPDATE: Here is a portion of the actual text:

It is the sense of the Senate--
(1) to reaffirm its support for all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces, including General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq;
(2) to strongly condemn any effort to attack the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all the members of the United States Armed Forces; and
(3) to specifically repudiate the unwarranted personal attack on General Petraeus by the liberal activist group Moveon.org.

Catch that second bullet? That's dangerously close to first amendment territory. Obviously they're not actually restricting speech because the resolution is nonbinding, but they are coercing it. If the Democrats were politically savvy at all they would reframe this debate to be about the freedom of speech. It isn't Congress' place to tell people what they can and cannot say in a public forum.