The ‘War on Terror’ is like a war on dandruff. It’s a metaphor, it’s nothing. The Civil War was real.

— Gore Vidal, in the currently-running History Channel documentary, “Lincoln.”

This statement is getting lots of space on the blogs tonight, and it made me do a double-take at the old TV.

Of course, one wouldn’t dare say such a thing in the face of one of men and women who’ve been injured in this misbegotten atrocity, or in the face of one of their mothers, fathers, children, spouses …. They know damn well that death and suffering are not nothing; dandruff doesn’t claim lives and limbs. But it is the kind of head-shaker that gets one’s attention, and the kind of thing one would expect from an iconoclast like Vidal. Nontheless, it begs the kind of questions I’ve been asking here for three years.

How do you kill a tactic? How do you know when you’ve won? How does it know when it has lost? (Must we kill every person who harbors such a willingness in his heart?) And how does this tactic surrender to US, and how, and when, and where?

Finally, how who we kill a tactic that lives in lesser proportion in the impurity of our own deeds. For no man lives and does not sin, but all have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God.