Country first.

Everyone send this to Senator John McCain (R-AZ).

Organizing for America sent out an email telling members of its mailing list to call and tell Senator McCain not to filibuster the Defense bill because of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

But I disagree. The Senator should filibuster the bill. He should get every Republican in the Senate to filibuster it with him. I would love to see the news cycle from here to Election Day be nothing but all the Senate’s Republicans taking turns reading phone books so that they can prevent the passage of a defense bill during wartime. Country first.

The houses of war and peace

Andrew Sullivan:

My point, I suppose, is that this kind of cycle in this kind of environment is something that once started, no one can stop. It is a function of fringe Christian fundamentalism finally engaging fringe Islamist fundamentalism in a war of increasing terror and intolerance in a seamless global media world. It is the responsibility of all of us of actual faith rather than fanaticism to stand up and oppose this before it engulfs us all.

The Long War is only the military theatre of a much greater struggle. The world’s two largest Abrahamic civilizations are Islam and the West, and within each is a house of war and a house of peace. What divides them is the difference between those who want a total war of one civilization against the other, and those who don’t. The most ancient Abrahamic civilization, the Jewish people, are uniquely situated in the center of it all, and their own houses of war and peace, along with those of Muslims in Palestine, may well set the example the world follows.

I started saying this to my fellow Americans about Osama and his allies, but it applies universally to the other civilization’s house of war: They don’t want to destroy us. They want us to destroy ourselves.