Your emotional problem with the statistics: "increase our casualties at will " is a very, very silly straw man. I make no claim of the terorists abilities- only their intent.
What casualties will result from attacks no one ever knows. However attacks are made for the purpose of inflicting casualties.
It is the number of attacks that they are able to increase and the resources devoted to them. They do so during the election season- as the casualty statistics show.
BTW Operation Phantom Fury started a week after the election was over.
Ad hominem, eh? Ha ha you lose. Take a college level stats course, you will find that although figures may be correlated, that does not imply causation. There may be other reasons for the observed data, which in this case there are, although you choose to ignore them favor of your pet argument.
Thanks for making my point about Operation Phantom Fury. Even though it started a week after the election was over, your figures include the casualties from that operation in an attempt to show the insurgents are "killing GI;s in Iraq to elect Democrats." It's a fine point, please do your best to grasp it now that you've made it. You clearly missed it on the first go.
You absolutely did make claim of the terrorists' abilities when you stated they increase US casualties. Duh? I don't blame you for backtracking, though, on such an untenable argument, especially now that I have furthered your education with these nastly little things called "facts."
You can call people who are more methodical with the facts than you are stupid, and you can claim they are making emotional arguments. Perhaps this works in lieu of valid argument for you most of the time. However, in this case the facts remain: Insurgents in Iraq attacking US forces are not the reason for US casualties increasing during election years. Correlated, maybe, causation? No.