Congressional Republicans, Vote Vets and a couple of ex-Senators have a message for you:

This ad -- more powerfully than any other in recent memory -- exposed the truth about Republicans, and helped end the careers of several incompetent troop-haters, who finally faced the music over the bait-and-switch hypocrisy they'd been selling the voters for years. Under instructions from the National Republican Committee, George Allen, Conrad Burns, Rick Santorum, Jim Talent and others dutifully complied with their orders: say you support the troops, but vote to kill them.

This cold-blooded political manipulation cost thousands of brave Americans their lives over the course of four years, but only when the truth came to light did it cost these Republican traitors their jobs. Maybe it should have cost them much, much more, but the political system only gives us one option: dump politicians who vote to kill American troops.

Seems like a no-brainer, doesn't it?

Then you tell me why Republicans continue to vote unanimously to send unarmored, untrained, unrested (and even, Salon and the Hartford Courant tell us, wounded and mentally unstable) troops to Iraq.

In a recent vote, the Republican members of the House Appropriations Committee unanimously opposed requiring that the troops sent to Iraq be properly prepared for their mission and protected with armor. Again.

So who did it? Does one of these troop-killers live near you? Let's name names:

Alabama: Robert Aderholt

California: John Doolittle and Jerry Lewis

Florida: Ander Crenshaw, Dave Weldon and C.W. "Bill" Young

Georgia: Jack Kingston

Idaho: Michael K. Simpson

Illinois: Mark Steven Kirk and Ray LaHood

Iowa: Tom Latham

Kansas: Todd Tiahrt

Kentucky: Harold Rogers

Louisiana: Rodney Alexander

Michigan: Joe Knollenberg

Mississippi: Roger Wicker

Missouri: Jo Ann Emerson

Montana: Dennis Rehberg

New Jersey: Rodney Frelinghuysen

New York: James Walsh

Ohio: Ralph Regula and David Hobson

Pennsylvania: John Peterson

Tennessee: Zach Wamp

Texas: John Carter, John Culberson and Kay Granger

Virginia: Virgil Goode and Frank Wolf

In the days ahead, hundreds more Republicans will close their eyes to the reality so starkly portrayed by Vote Vets, and the political retribution so clearly visited upon their colleagues who failed to heed the basic message that America will no longer tolerate the Republican plan to abandon and expose our troops to preventable death.

The more who die, of course, the stronger becomes the Republican mantra that their deaths must not be in vain. For Republicans, more dead troops = more emotional heartstrings they can pull to continue their shell game. And the more heartstrings pulled, the more troops they're free to kill. It's the only part of the Iraq war that actually does pay for itself. Small wonder, then, that we're entering the fifth year of this war, sending yet more troops into battle, and still sending them without what they need to survive the fight. In any other setting and with any other players, the plan would be considered lunacy. But for Republicans, the blood of the troops has become the oil in their political machine.

There is no other plausible excuse for it.

And as surely as the sun rises, Republicans will later this week once again vote against armor for the troops. Why? Because George W. Bush says it will pay for them at the polls.

In 2008, whatever black magic George W. Bush has been using to accomplish this ghoulish deception runs out, and at long last the reality of facing voters who know the truth and have buried the dead -- the reality that cut short the blood-fueled careers of the worst offenders in the upper chamber -- will be visited on their weaker siblings in the House.

Democrats will be working overtime in the days ahead to make sure that it is so.