Politics & Power Quote by Mark Kennedy

Kennedy’s line is built to make a distant, contested project feel morally simple and domestically urgent. “Overseas” does quiet work up front: it frames the war as happening safely elsewhere, while implying it’s being fought on behalf of people back home. Then comes the talismanic phrase “America’s fighting men and women,” a bipartisan shield that folds policy into patriotism; if you question the mission, you risk sounding like you question the troops.

The real engine is the villain construction: “those who would attack America and plunge the world into a period of darkness.” That’s not a description so much as a template. It collapses a range of actors, motives, and geopolitical grievances into a single apocalyptic threat, swapping specifics for a civilizational binary: America equals light; the enemy equals darkness. The rhetorical payoff is permission. If the alternative is “darkness,” almost any tactic can be sold as necessity, and almost any cost can be framed as responsible prevention.

“Waging war” signals grit and continuity, but the closer is the most revealing: “their success can easily be seen.” The claim is designed to preempt scrutiny. “Easily” suggests that only the willfully blind doubt progress; “seen” shifts the burden from evidence to perception, a neat move when metrics are messy and timelines unclear. In the post-9/11 political climate this language echoes the era’s “with us or against us” moral clarity, offering reassurance at home while sanding down the ambiguities that wars overseas inevitably produce.