Events in the past week have crystallized the complete hypocrisy the yapping talking-point dittoheads of the conservative partisanry hold with regards to our troops. Honest conservatives realize that the war in Iraq is simply a meat grinder which is serving no good purpose. Anytime our troops earn another victory, the conservatives move the goalposts and make “victory” simply an illusion.

We toppled Saddam. Victory was declared. He was even captured and hung. Our troops stayed.

Iraq had elections and wrote a Constitution. Victory was declared. Purple fingers were held up. Our troops stayed.

We had a surge. The current general appointed by Pres. Bush declared victory by subtracting huge swaths of numbers. Our troops still stay.

The concept of victory for the conservative partisans is fleeting… what would they talk about without Iraq? The concept for honest conservatives — the only-fight-when-necessary and stay-outta-the-nation-building-business type of conservatives — seems to have evaporated as their more partisan ideological brethren have pummeled them with the dogma stick over and over.

And so it is that the conserv-o-partisans came to rally round Gen. Petraeus and his fuzzy math earlier in September. Yet, they never stopped trashing those troops with whom they disagreed. The New York Times 7 were pilloried despite the fact they were simply telling us their honest opinion based on the facts they saw every day on the ground. Three of those seven men are now dead.

And I already wrote about Rush Limbaugh’s buffoon-like haranguing of Iraq War vets — such as the NYT 7 and the VoteVets organizers — who are now opposing this war because they completely disagree with the political brinkmanship being played out by the conserv-o-partisans. Limbaugh called those soldiers “phony” despite the fact they’ve literally lost life and limb whereas he was able to avoid Vietnam in his day because he had a boil on his ass.

This last week there was also an interview at MSNBC with conservative Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. Rep. Blackburn is a war cheerleader and was regurgitating the anti-MoveOn talking points with “Tucker” sub David Schuster.

Mr. Schuster then asked her if she knew the name of the last soldier from her district killed in Iraq.

The partisan Congresswoman went blank. She had no clue.

She could recite line for line the hollow complaints about a friggin’ newspaper ad that simply called a spade a spade but when it came time to actually supporting our troops by honoring their memory she had no idea who that brave soul even was.

Then, an interesting thing happened. Mr. Schuster named the fellow — and Rep. Blackburn’s staff and other partisans immediately went to work trying to figure out if there was some “out” there, some excuse to stand on for why she didn’t know who the last soldier to die from her district was.

Within hours they thought they had it. They claimed the soldier Mr. Schuster named wasn’t from her district but actually from a neighboring district (the soldier had indeed grown up in that neighboring district… but read on). Mr. Schuster and his staff had done the research but now they were being told it was incorrect. The partisans demanded an apology.

Mr. Schuster’s supervisor at MSNBC, Dan Abrams, forced him to apologize on air (possibly even writing much of the mea culpa for him) despite Mr. Schuster’s insistence that he simply needed some time to re-verify the address info he had researched. Supervisor Abrams had none of it and so Mr. Schuster apologized on air despite the fact he wasn’t afforded time to re-verify his earlier work.

The conserv-o-partisan choir rejoiced and said, See, another Dan Rather moment of journalists trying to hammer the Republicans but lying to do so….

Except, it turns out after the verification Mr. Schuster wanted to do was actually done that he was correct in the first place and had no reason to apologize. The fallen soldier Mr. Schuster described had been living with his girlfriend and her mother in Rep. Blackburn’s district for nearly a year before his deployment — and that is his last known legal address.

And none of that changes the fact that Rep. Blackburn, cheerleader of war and ignorer of facts, had no clue which of her constituents were dying in the Iraq War she wants to continue until some partisan somewhere cries ‘uncle’ and declares “victory” (again, but this time for good)… Or that Rush Limbaugh would rather talk about boils on his arse and call actual men and women in uniform “phony” than get off his Oxycontin and serve his country. (And we already knew that the Republican leadership thinks those troops’ deaths are just a “small price” anyway…)

Hypocrisy, thy name is conservative.

Support our troops by bringing them home.

(h/t Mark at NewsCorpse)