that the Corker-Kaine AUMF is now being opposed in that most quintessential of conservative publications, the National Review, which has amusingly come out against this most recent of legal cementings of Dick Cheney's Forever War. And as for its sponsors, Corker is of course a Republican, but remember Kaine? He was the Democrats' Vice-Presidential candidate two years ago. Go Democrats!

OK, sure, nobody cares about war anymore. 70% of the world's countries, blah blah blah. Sure, tomorrow it'll be worse, whatev.

For some reason (maybe it's the name) all of this stuff is reminiscent of Joe Haldeman's fantastic science-fiction series The Forever War. Haldeman depicts a war across interstellar space without any fantastic notions of faster-than-light travel -- thus when the troops go off to fight their battles against the presumed enemy, the "Taurans," and come back to Earth, they discover that the Earth they left is gone forever. Thanks to relativistic time-dilation, then, the outcome of the war is as follows (from the Wikipedia page):

Humanity has begun to clone itself, resulting in a new, collective species calling itself simply Man. Unlike its predecessor Man is able to communicate with the Taurans, who are also clones. It is discovered that the war started due to a misunderstanding; the colony ships were lost to accidents and those on Earth with a vested interest in a new war used these disappearances as an excuse to begin the conflict. The futile, meaningless war, which had lasted for more than a thousand years, ends.

At least Haldeman's imaginary forever war takes the reader to exotic new planets over the space of a millennium of pointless violence. The Corker-Kaine one, not so much.