Endless GOPer War

Quoted from http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2008/02/an-electorate-i.html:

p m carpenter's commentary: An Electorate in the Wilderness?

...Contrast that history with today. Or, to be a bit more pointed, contrast that history with what the Republican Party is hawking today. Keeping us in war -- a vague, perpetual, virtually endless world war against the vague enemy of a tactic -- is the once-isolationist GOP's promise to America. It's on its masthead, it's in its blood, it litters its rhetoric.

For the GOP, gone is the bottom-up politics of the 20th century. Or, at least, the GOP wants it gone -- banished in perpetuity. What it has to sell is top-down fear, complete with Orwellian broadcasts on the big screen, full of dire warnings that unseen enemies threaten us everywhere. We must stay engaged, stay the course, stay unremittingly embroiled hither and yon.

What drives the party of perpetual war is merely, of course, a perpetual propaganda machine, every bit as ugly and pointless as Orwell's. We must win the war, although the war is amorphous. We must defeat the enemy, although he is just as amorphous. We must persevere, although the object of our perseverance is unattainable -- the eradication of a centuries-old political tactic...