Hot air tells us that:
What gives him this magic power to unite the GOP?
Well, it seems that this terrible GOP is foolishly and obstinately in favor of terrible and foolish GOP principles:
Over the past couple of decades, the American people have grown more pro-environment, more culturally tolerant, and more suspicious of the unregulated free market, and yet the Republican Party has responded with a series of litmus tests for its presidential candidates that represent the political equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling “la la la, I can’t hear you.
Fortunately, for the GOP, the good General Petraeus opposes every single principle that matters for the GOP base, with the sole exception that he wants to conduct an unpopular war against Afghans to force on them a moderate version of Islam, a animatronic version of Islam, a version of Islam that actually is the religion of peace, that treats women with dignity, refrains from executing apostates, and so on and so forth.
Creating a fake version of Islam that fits nicely into the pretty multicutural rainbow and getting Afghans to swallow it is not a realistic military objective. In fact it is not even a military objective. Soldiers kill people and break things. Military objectives are the kind of objectives you can achieve by killing people and breaking things.
So a general who has been conducting a losing war will unite the GOP behind everything it hates, plus a policy of continuing to lose the war for the next four years.
