Reply #88: Unfortunately, Sir

[The Magistrate]

If you insist on the course you have proposed, intending to with-hold your vote from the struggle against the usurper, you will in fact be contributing to his victory, and so will bring about the result you claim to deplore, and desire to prevent. You will be in fact laboring on his triumphal arch, and securing him in the capability to expand war further in the Near East.

There will be considerable criticism of the war in Iraq by any Democratic Party candidate, but it will probably not be to your liking. It will be couched as criticism of the incompetence with which it was carried out, and be denounced as a mere distraction from the effort against Al Queda. Even criticism of the lies told to move the people to initial support for this course will have the latter as the subtext; even criticism of the profiteering by administration cronies will be given its edge by that line. That is a view that is popular with the people of our county, who are in no doubt that they were attacked by Islamic radicals, and consider it an important part of the nation's business today to liquidate those jihadists.

A candidate who took the stump to denounce war, to decry criminal behavior by U.S. forces, would be jeered down in moments, and provide the enemy with a landslide victory that would make Vice-President Mondale's defeat look like a damned close contest by compare.