I personally believe the majority of Americans are practical people in many respects. By practical I mean that they respond to problems in their daily lives using the tools at their disposal.

If gas prices get too high, middle class Americans may trade in their cars, drive fewer miles and/or just suck it up and pay the higher price, making the difference up with a reduction in some other category of household expense. That's being practical.

Then they will blame whoever they think is in charge of gas prices, usually the government. That's also being practical, because Americans do know how the system works, even if they don't say it out loud. Then the gas prices will automagically go back down a little bit.

They will have the same or similar responses to higher food prices, housing prices, utility costs, and anything else that has an economic elasticity associated with it. And it will always include blaming the government.

When it comes to the media, however, most Americans think that the most practical thing is not to waste too much time trying to put what the media says into a context, but to basically just stick with the key word associations. They can still blame the government in any case.

To your point:

If the media said every day all day long, "support the war," we would be out of Iraq already.

If the media said, "support the oil companies," most Americans would say, "yeah, right, when monkeys fly out of my butt," and we would be out of Iraq.

But the media says, "support the troops," which the majority of Americans translate into "support American lives" and so we're still there.

The thing is the majority of people who want the troops to come home and at the same time want Iraq not to descend into a genocidal civil war would like the media to say, "support the human lives in Iraq." But the media is not going to say that.

So, we're probably not going to leave Iraq until gas is $5.00 a gallon, the housing bubble bursts, the stock market crashes and the U.S. is in full recession. Then, as a practical matter, Americans will start screaming at the top of their lungs, "support the economy," at which point our government will get serious about leaving Iraq. Because we're practical.

Thank god for typos, unconscious associations and Freudian slips.

It's a wonderful list of five words. It means exactly what it says:

It's just excellent.

From the article you cited at:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/06/0081080

This:

Above all, MacArthur urged that no fewer than thirty-four atomic bombs be dropped on what he characterized as “retardation targets” in Manchuria, including critical concentrations of troops and planes. Even this soon seemed insufficient. MacArthur later added that had he been permitted, he not only would have launched as many as fifty atomic bombs but also would have used “wagons, carts, trucks, and planes” to create “a belt of radioactive cobalt” that would neatly slice the Korean thumb from China. “For at least sixty years,” he said, “there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north.”

And this:

The Republican platform that Ike ran on in the fall of 1952 was a freefall into fantasy, a fatal compact by party moderates with a right wing that would eventually push them into extinction. For the first time since the Civil War era, one major American political party charged another one with treason.

seems to bring us full circle.

Perhaps we will eventually attack Iran militarily, even if it requires that a small group of "heros" (such as Cheney, his neocon friends and a few other operatives) does so against the publicly expressed desires of the President, the Congress and the American people.

People like this, if they have their way, will eventually get us all killed. By all, I mean every living thing on the surface of the planet. At present, they have contented themselves with advocating the violent overthrow of their own country (i.e, America) through the proxy of a war in Iraq, itself made possible through a false pretext of national security.

I agree with the premise that we are involved in a culture war within America that is polarized with liberals at one end and conservatives at the other. The stakes are increasing with each election cycle and may eventually result in a permanent majority by one side or the other.

We seem to be rapidly moving towards Imperium.

Serious to say the least.