For what do these men pray?

Mark Twain answered that question almost exactly a century ago.

The whole of “The War Prayer” is worth a read, but the pith of it is this…

…
When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory--*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it.

Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words.

Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them!

With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;

help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;

help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;

help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire;

help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief;

help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it –

- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.

Amen.

38% of this country makes this prayer, in their hearts, fervently, every night and without a trace of irony.

They have succumbed.

They have capitulated to the moral darkness. And because they have ripped their true, human hearts from their own chests in exchange for an anodized lump of false certitude, they must be flogged from power and never be allowed to return.

They cannot be trusted to lead our nation in any office, from any platform, behind any pulpit whatsoever, because for the dregs who killed the Party of Lincoln and now cling to its rotting corpse -- Cheney, Coulter, Dobson and the rest of their misbegotten breed -- we can no longer afford to pretend that Republicanism is merely a political “lifestyle choice” which we need to continue to indulge as different-but-equally-valid if we are to keep our Progressive street cred up to date.

Its practitioners need to know -- from us, loud and clear -- that they are no longer just wrong: they have become detestable.

No longer just erroneous, but perfidious.

That remaining a Republican in the age of Dubya is not noble loyalty, but something dirty, weak and dishonorable -- a filthy habit stuck somewhere between Munchausen by Proxy and subway masturbation.

They have long since ceased being a Party. They are an Electorally Transmitted Disease, and abstinence is the only cure.