MoveOn's ad questioning Gen. Petraeus's credibility was certainly the talk of the town yesterday. Leave it to Chris Matthews on Hardball to get right to the bottom of it by conducting one of the most frustrating interviews ever of MoveOn's Eli Pariser and DailyKos's Markos Moulitsas. Is he just congenitally unable to let people finish their answers uninterrupted?

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Markos puts questions of the ad's appropriateness into perspective:

To me, you know, way out in California, it's almost amusing to see how in Washington DC, everybody is all up in arms over an ad. You know, we're in the middle of this bloody war, almost 4,000 dead, half a trillion dollars spent, and people are going to talk about how inappropriate an ad is? I think it's patently ridiculous. And most people, outside of this sort of Beltway environment really don't care about an ad. They want to see our men and women coming home, safe and sound to their families.

Markos also lands some solid jabs at the recalcitrance of the Democrats to play a stronger role in bringing an end to the war.

Ezra Klein and Jeffrey Feldman weigh in on the Republican politics of distraction.