The GOP Presidential Candidates Want Never-Ending War

The Republican Party slate of would be presidential nominees gives the typical GOP lip service to "supporting the troops." Unfortunately, as we saw during the years of misrule under Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney, this claimed concern for the troops doesn't actually translate into providing needed equipment or proper care for troops that are injured or the psychologically damage from the fool's errand wars that Bush/Cheney brought to the nation. Yet the GOP base continues to eat up these disingenuous platitudes of support and the current GOP presidential candidates seem only too happy to talk of a never ending war on terror. Perhaps part of it is the mindset of the Christianist/Tea Party base that requires that there always be an "enemy" be it domestic or foreign. Or maybe it's a related psychosis that requires that the GOP base always needs to have someone to look down upon. A column in The Daily Beast looks at the never ending war promised by the current GOP line up. Here are some highlights:

Should the United States be permanently at war? Listen carefully to this week’s Republican presidential debate on national security and the answer becomes pretty clear. For most of the major GOP candidates, the answer is yes.

Within the first few minutes of the GOP debate, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Santorum had all declared the United States at war while answering a question about the Patriot Act. In making this assertion, none of them mentioned Afghanistan or Iraq, the two countries where large numbers of U.S. troops have in recent years actually been fighting. No, for the Republican presidential candidates, talking about Iraq and Afghanistan is thinking small. They were talking about America’s “war against terror,” a war they believe should define the way the U.S. government approaches civil liberties, and spends money, for, in Gingrich’s words, “the rest of our lives.”

[A]t the debate, the major Republican candidates didn’t even bother to explain why. They simply declared that because there is a threat, America remains at war. Sure, there’s a terrorist threat and there always will be, even if Al Qaeda itself goes out of business. But if that’s all it takes for the United States to be at war, the United States will never be a peacetime nation again, which means we’ll never be able to regain the civil liberties we enjoyed before 9/11, or tame a defense and homeland security budget that has grown so massively in the last decade.

They would never dream of suggesting that America’s “war on terror” requires higher taxes, a draft or anything else that would burden the ordinary American. And yet they keep using the language of war to insulate America’s defense budget from serious scrutiny and to suggest that people accused of terrorism don’t deserve basic protections under the law.

As George Orwell famously noted, bad public policy often hides behind dishonest language. Nations that truly are permanently at war generally go bankrupt or become police states or both. Nations whose leaders pretend they are permanently at war when they are actually not simply suffer a profound distortion of their national priorities. In the United States today, that is bad enough.