Well, you can't blame the Republicans for going to their bench in the contest against Kerry and calling on Jeremiah Denton, a former Republican senator (1981-87) who spent many grim years as a POW in Vietnam.

What's odd, though, is that more than half of Denton's current Mobile Register op-ed deals not with geopolitics but with God:

Top priority should be placed on an effort to recover our most fundamental founding belief that our national objectives, policies and laws should reflect obedience to the will of Almighty God. Our Declaration of Independence, our national Constitution and each of the states' constitutions stress that basic American national principle....

Let's remember that over 95 percent of Americans during our founding days were Christians, and though our Founding Fathers stipulated that no one was to be compelled to believe in any religion, and also stipulated that there would be no single Christian denomination installed as a national religion, there was no question that our laws were to be firmly based on the Judean Ten Commandments and on Christ's mandate to love your neighbor as you love yourself....

Though Rome and other empires have decayed and fallen, the cultural war in the United States can and should be won by the majority of Americans -- a majority to whom Kerry and the Democrats disdainfully refer to as the "far right." They are people who believe in God and in the original concept of "one nation under God." ...

Is this just an Alabama thing? (Denton is, after all, writing for readers in the state that's probably going to make Judge Roy Moore governor a few years from now.) Or is this line increasingly going to be that of the GOP as a whole -- namely, that America has a state religion, but the nation's noble theocrats generously refrain from converting non-Christians at gunpoint?

On foreign policy, Denton makes a rather dubious claim:

If the U.S. had followed the Democratic Party line, the Cold War would have concluded with the U.S. having to surrender without a fight, or the U.S. would have been defeated in a nuclear war with acceptable losses to the USSR.

Elsewhere, he's been a bit more blunt:

"If we had gone the way Kerry was voting while I was in the Senate, we would have Russian soldiers walking in our streets today."

Which just goes to show that you can suffer grievously for your country as a POW without having a clue about the country's history.