Last night the AP reported that President Obama, as expected yesterday, has formally requested war powers from Congress to go after ISIS, claiming that they would “lose.”  The same man who gave a speech in 2002 calling Iraq “a dumb war” has now asked for authorization for military action irrespective of national borders to fight ISIS.  (In case you don’t remember, that’s also the speech where he falsely claimed his grandfather enlisted right after Pearl Harbor, etc.)

Perhaps we should be happy he’s asking at all.  This isn’t Obama’s first military action, if you’ll remember, and folks were calling foul last November over his making the Middle East look like a deadly version of Old MacDonald’s Farm: Here a drone, there a drone, everywhere a drone drone… and that’s not even counting Libya.

Of course, Republicans and Democrats are falling into the same old fighting positions of their own:

Republicans expressed unhappiness that he had chosen to exclude any long-term commitment of ground forces, while some Democrats voiced dismay that he had opened the door to deployment at all.

So the Republicans want a long-term war, and the Dems want to sit on their hands.

Is there no one around who’s willing to just do one Enola Gay-style flyover and be done with it?  Of course not, because that’s not how we fight wars now.  Instead of going in and demolishing the enemy, we tweet about how mad we are.  We talk about really hard sanctions.  We send troops with impossible rules of engagement and media crews who will fry them for any misstep.  We imprison troops now for things that 70 years ago came under the heading of “War is hell.”  We don’t fight wars anymore.

Perhaps that’s because the Commander-in-Chief is both devoid of testicular fortitude and bereft of any belief in the principles that this nation once stood for.  The only balls President Obama has are small, white, dimpled, and carried around in other people’s pockets.

And if Congress authorizes that military action, God help the men and women who will be sent—some of them to their third war.  God help the families who will say goodbye again, some of them forever.  God help those who come home forever changed, desperately in need of support.  And God help those of us who must fight the ever-tightening stranglehold on our liberties while they’re gone.

God help us all.