Bill INDC has written an excellent deconstruction of the social conservatives' arguments: Part one and Part two.

Mary attempts to define the New Silent Majority political space. Check off the boxes as appropriate.

One of the NYC Liberal Hawks (who's really a conservative, but he likes hanging with us) notes a poignant story of soldiers returning home:

. . . . We flew into JFK, and we were talking on the way back: What's going to happen? What will we be facing? Is it going to be like the Vietnam era, are there going to be people spitting at us? We didn't know. We had that much trepidation about it.

"We get into JFK, we step out of the breezeway into the main terminal, and directly in front of us was an elderly gentleman carrying a bag. And he immediately stopped, set his bag down, and the first thing we all thought was, 'Oh, Lord, here we go already.' He just stopped and looked at us for a second, and then tears came to his eyes and he saluted us.

"And -- I'm breaking up now [editor's note: with tears] -- every one of us just started crying like babies. Everybody in the terminal -- I kid you not, at least two to three hundred people -- just started clapping, spontaneously. To me, it was so much worth what we were doing, to realize that people over here actually get what we were doing. We weren't over there because it's fun. We're over there doing a job.

"When I saw the Super Bowl commercial, I just started bawling like a baby again because that was something totally unexpected. We had no idea that people actually appreciated what we're doing, from what we see on the news. We thought we were going to come back and get eggs thrown at us. It was so refreshing to know that what we were seeing on the news is just a bunch of garbage that's being concocted by the media, that 99.9 percent of the country doesn't believe that way.

Us hip bohemian urbane Manhattanite Liberal Hawks salute you too.

Too curmudgeonly to be either a liberal or a conservative - in fact I would designate her the HL Mencken of the blogsphere - Andrea Harris on war as the Easy Off of global relations.

UPDATE: Bill INDC is still on the case, with a tidbit about Jefferson's lack of religiosity.