That’s what’s so remarkable about the situation we’re in right now; pretty much all of our problems that we face as a country stem from the simple fact that we spend HALF of our money each year trying to (often successfully) kill people we don’t know, in case they might try to kill us, and getting a lot of our own people killed in the process.  Is that smart?  Is this a country, or a mink farm?  As usual, in both wars, arms we sold to our last best friend got turned against us, so we showed them what’s what by buying a whole lot more.  Children conduct snowball fights with a more sophisticated strategy, and snow is, unlike the weapons we employ, free, and nobody dies.

Murtha, unlike his many Republican critics that suddenly emerged when he “prematurely” called out the Iraq War as a fraud and a disaster with no conceivable goal in sight in 2005, was an actual combat veteran in Vietnam, and although defense contractor dough had long since gummed up his spending priorities, he still could spot a deadly, pointless meat-grinder when he saw one, and then by defending himself against their cowardly attacks repeatedly revealed the neocons as the chickenhawk pussies they were and are.  And he did.  Sadly, the Democrats, who owe their 2006 and 2008 victories in part to outspoken antiwar Democrats like Murtha, clearly didn’t listen to him, or to the rest of the people who are quite aware that war costs a whole lot of money that might be better spent elsewhere, no matter what nonsense you read in the Washington Post or hear from David Gregory.

As a country, we’ve simply been sold a pig in a poke so obvious that we have to either admit our error now or literally go down the tubes trying to apply lipstick.  Sarah Palin has some experience in that area, and look… here she is.  She says Iran ought to be next, and didn’t even have to write that one on her hand, which I find rather disturbing.  Evidently, the current wars haven’t bankrupted us quite enough for the evergreen Republican Utopia to look good by comparison, so Sarah has spit out the teabaggers and reached for the Kristol Pistol and the Cheney Dick.  For Sarah, this is pretty much a lateral move, but for the teabaggers, not to mention normal Americans, it sucks.  (I hereby promise not to carry that metaphor any further…  CHNN has had a run on barf bags lately…)

Wars are now bipartisan again, just as they were when Murtha opened his jowly mouth, and worse, the right has decided that even two couldn’t possibly be enough, and no Democrat has yet called them insane.  If you ask me,  Murtha picked a good time to die.