Ron Paul.

However, they usually lack a grounding in history and Rep, Paul seems to draw a great following among people who lack much context in anything. (You see this a great deal with the health care debate as well, with Paulists stating something that is completely untrue, being corrected ,and continuing to state something that is unquestionably factually wrong “The HMO Act of 1974 required everyone to join an HMO,” is a common one.)

The truth is, there was no non-iterventionist “golden age.” Despite Washington’s warning to avoid foreign entanglements, we have always had an interventionist bent. It got more pronounced in the late 19th and early 20th Century, but our sending Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike to explore parts of the West that were not part of the Louisiana Purchase, promulgating the Monroe Doctrine and sending punitive expeditions against the Tripolitanian Pirates and against Korea in 1871, are not the act of a nation that is not involved aboard, potentially with naval and military forces.

War has, thus, been a big part of our history. Politicians were always sending people off to foreign wars (although in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, those foreign places often [but not always, considering upper Canada in the War of 1812] stopped being foreign as a result of the war).

I have a jaundiced view of politicians talking about the “honor” and “glory” of “sacrifice.” The dead 19 year old kid remains just as dead even after someone says the fine words on Memorial Day or Veterans’ Day. I always liked this quote from the 1993 film Gettysburg as something close to the truth:

“You know whats (sic) going to happen here in the morning? The whole damn reb (sic) army is going to be here. They’ll move through this town, occupy these hills on the other side and when our people get here Lee will have the high ground. There will be the devil to pay! The high ground! Meade will come in slowly, cautiously. New to command. They’ll be on his back in Washington. Wire hot with messages ‘Attack! Attack!’. So he will set up a ring around these hills. And when Lee’s army is nicely entrenched behind fat rocks on the high ground, Meade will finally attack, if he can coordinate the army. Straight up the hillside, out in the open, in that gorgeous field of fire. We will charge valiantly… and be butchered valiantly! And afterwards men in tall hats and gold watch fobs will thump their chest and say what a brave charge it was. Devin, I’ve led a soldier’s life, and I’ve never seen anything as brutally clear as this.”

Maybe, we listen to Ron Paul and others who do not want to send American kids to die abroad at least to the degree that we only do that where it is necessary.

Maybe we stop shredding the Constitution because we want to gain illusory security at the cost of our very real Liberty.

Maybe we learn that the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart don’t comfort the widow or tuck in the orphan.

Maybe we realize that, if you are a major sea-faring and economic power you are already entangled with the world, but that does not require at least the useless sacrifice of young people.

“you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori” Wilfred Owen, Gas Attack