I don't often read MoveOn's "Daily Mislead", mostly because it often ends up in my spam folder and it gets deleted. But after weeks of insisting and re-insiting that "this is not spam", I got a look at today's, and they make a good point about the first round of Bush ads that nobody else has made so far.

As the nation headed for war last year, President Bush "clamped down" on the media, extending and expanding a controversial policy that banned reporters from photographing flag-draped caskets of soldiers killed in combat. The White House said the policy was enforced to "spare the feelings of military families." Yet, in the very first television advertisement of his 2004 campaign, the president has blanketed the nation's airwaves with an image of "firefighters carrying a flag-draped body" from the 9/11 wreckage at Ground Zero.

The hypocrisy of preventing Americans from receiving a "reminder of the toll of war" at the very same time the president exploits an image of a dead body for his own political gain has caused an outrage among victims' families. Chris Burke, whose brother Tom died in the attacks, said, "Using my dead friends and my dead brother for political expediency is dead wrong. It's wrong, it's bad taste and an insult to the 3,000 people who died on Sept. 11."

Got that? The administration wont allow pictures of the flag-covered dead Americans coming back from Iraq, but they happily include pictures of flag-covered dead Americans at Ground Zero in their campaign ad. Since we're on an Orwell theme today, it would appear that "some dead bodies are more equal than others".

The common denominator of Bush's exploitation of flad-covered dead Americans? Cold political gain.