From the same folks who brought you the Swift Boat veterans commercials, the Midwest is now being bombarded with a new pro-Iraq war ad campaign, which claims the war in Iraq is actually the war against al Qaeda.

This is the Bush administration propaganda wing at work, trying to shore up support for their brand Republican agenda AND keep certain very vulnerable Midwestern Republican politicians from losing their jobs in the election this fall.

These new Swift Boaters are calling their newest pro-Iraq war, pro-Bush administration, pro-military/industrial establishment campaign "Midwest Heroes". You can see for yourselves what this fake, astroturf "grassroots" organization is all about.

Most despicable and cynical is one of the ads that features the mothers and fathers of four dead soldiers.

From today's Minneapolis Star Tribune:

"The final mother figure in the ad tells the camera: "We have to finish this job to remember Erik's sacrifice, and all of the other fallen heroes." She is identified as M. J. Kesterson, and many viewers will assume she is the mother of Chief Warrant Officer Erik Kesterson, 29, a helicopter pilot killed in 2003 who figures prominently in the ad.

But she's not his mom.

M.J. Kesterson is married to Erik's father, who also appears in the ad, and she's Erik's stepmother. His mother is Dolores Kesterson, and the distinction is important because Dolores Kesterson is opposed to a war in which she believes her son died to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist and to avenge 9/11, which was not connected to Iraq.

Dolores, who is a member of Gold Star Families for Peace, voiced her opposition when she was granted a brief meeting with President Bush in 2004 and gave Bush a letter in which she wrote: "The label 'Iraqi Freedom' doesn't work for me. Iraq is not free. It is occupied, and now, after all the loss of life on both sides, they don't want us there."

Bush didn't want to hear it. Neither did a soft-money group called Progress for America, which raised almost $40 million for the Bush campaign in 2004 and is spending half a million dollars or more here to test whether pro-war propaganda can stop the slide in public support for the war (the latest CNN/USA Today Poll shows 56 percent of Americans oppose the war)."