More of the same

MANIFESTO

I see that Senators Sanctimony and Septuagenarian are at it again—beating the drums for total warfare in the Middle East.

A minimalist approach in Afghanistan is a recipe not for winning smarter but for losing slowly at tremendous cost in American lives, treasure and security ...

Their rationale for such a course of action is that such a war could be won and

our vital national interest in Afghanistan is to prevent it from once again becoming a haven for terrorists to plan attacks against America and U.S. allies.

And there's the nub of their argument: McCain's answer to just about anything is war, and Lieberman is deathly concerned about attacks against (unnamed but wholly obvious) U.S. allies.

Once upon a time, Senator Sanctimony had a brain in his head: He was a strident civil rights advocate and can still say the right things when it comes to various social issues. However, once he got religion, many bets were off. He supported the hideous McCain in 2008 and still, clearly, supports his foreign policy.

When Ron Silver died, I noticed the same thing had happened to him. Here was a guy who'd supported Clinton in the 90s, was strident in his defense of the First Amendment, was president of Actors Equity, and yet felt compelled to speak on the Republicans' behalf in New York City in August, 2004.

As the Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg once said, “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.” Both Lieberman and Silver were good people; it's too bad they allowed their religion to take them to the dark side.