One of the most infuriating aspects of the war forever caucus (of which John McCain is the most vocal, visible member) is the imperviousness of their arguments to facts, and/or their ability to take any new fact pattern and retro-fit into an argument for more war. The arguments are grounded in a worldview about the gloriousness and or necessity of imperial conquest, but always masked in the vocabulary of the current tactical situation.
Take this gem discovered by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post. Turns out in McCain’s foreign policy speech the other day he basically lifted a paragraph verbatim from a column he wrote in October 2001 in support of the war on terror. The point is that the posture towards war is always the same, no matter the somewhat significant changes in the actual state of the world in the intervening years.
