that the administration chooses to call a war. As America’s relationships with other nations have taken an increasingly “my way or the highway” tone, even tools of statecraft like diplomacy, information sharing and economic leverage take on the nature of warlike measures.

One fervently hopes that a change of regime come November can reverse America’s vector toward Orwellian dystopia, but one must also keep in mind Jeff Huber’s one and only law of American politics:

Lord Acton did not say that, “Absolute power tends to corrupt Republicans.”