What are we fighting for? That is not an easy question to answer, and the truth of the matter is that the answer will vary from person to person, with each answer standing a chance of being correct. This is because there is no over-riding reason for the fight. Iraq was never the threat to our very existence that Nazi Germany was (no matter what war supporters said then or say now), and there were too many alternate reasons given by the leadership of our country. At this point, we don't know for what purpose we got in, and we stay in the fight merely because we have been in the fight. It went on yesterday, our "leadership" is unconcerned with ending it, so it goes on...aimlessly, wastefully, seemingly endlessly. This is not to say that this sort of inertia is sufficient reason to continue to the fight, though I have noticed that this is the one that supporters and their president keep going back to. Not matter what they say, throwing more lives into the meat grinder is not justified by those already ground up.

So why did those 14 die? Why have all those civilians who have died this week as well? Because the war has been going on, and it goes on because it has been going on. Yes, it is absurd, but these are absurd times. Going back to the origin of the war, there are so many reasons that were batted around that I doubt we can really say at this point. I do think we might agree on this though: in large part we are in this war because we were attacked by people who wanted to strike at America in a spectacular and horrific fashion, and did so. We were traumatized afterward, and wanted to find the resolve to stop it from happening again - not here and not anywhere - ever again. We had a leader to whom many of us looked in those days, and we trusted that he understood what to do. He did not. He used our trauma to pursue ideological ends, as a political bludgeon, he divided us, and he fooled us into think that invading a country ruled by a brutal, hideously aweful man was a part of striking back against those who struck us, but that had nothing to do with them. He fooled us. Some continue to be fooled. Some have awoken. But the war goes on, the legions of well-trained terrorists grow because of it, the millions who hate us grow because of it.

There are enormous problems with having a one-issue litmus test for Supreme Court Justices, or an attitude that justice selections should be made with one goal in mind. Those justices will have authority to make decisions on other issues not related to that one issue. Those justices that are most likely to make it clear before hand that they will overturn Roe are those who also take a dim view of citizen's access to the courts, environmental regulation, restraint of the executive, civil rights in general, and all matter of other important areas of the law. A focus on Roe alone will get the anti-abortion crowd, were they to get their way, and indeed all of us, a far nastier, less compassionate, less free country ruled by a reactionary attitude to the law that seeks to turn back the clock to the late 19th century by eliminating much of the progress that has been made in the past century. Reliably anti-Roe justicial candidates have also a reliably dark vision of what America should be. The frightening thing is that, were the the anit-abortion people to realize this, I don't think they would care.