In an op-ed for the New Hampshire Union Leader, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney attacked President Obama for a “peacetime spending binge,” as pointed out by Greg Sargent. From the Op-ed:

Barack Obama is facing a financial emergency on a grander scale. Yet his approach has been to engage in one of the biggest peacetime spending binges in American history. With its failed stimulus package, its grandiose new social programs, its fervor for more taxes and government regulations, and its hostility toward business, the administration has made the debt problem worse, hindered economic recovery and needlessly cost American workers countless jobs.

This is a frightening level disconnection from reality from the guy that is supposed to be the most sensible of the Republican candidates.

What I find even more troubling than Romney’s incredible ignorance is that this remark wasn’t some offhanded comment at a town hall, but was in a clearly planned op-ed directed at likely Republican primary voters.

If I know campaigns, there was likely at least a half-dozen campaign aides and advisers that reviewed the op-ed to offer suggestions or, at the very least, proof read it before it was submitted. So, this means none of these people in the Romney camp, or even a member of the editorial staff at the Union Leader, thought to say, “Hey Mitt, I don’t know if you want to use the phrase ‘peacetime’ given that we are still fighting two wars and a kinetic military action in Libya.”

The fact that such a mistake was even possible for the campaign of a presidential primary frontrunner shows how totally desensitized the nation has become to war after a decade of continuous conflict. Among the political class, endless war has become accepted as the new normal.

War is peace. Or at least we have been fighting wars so removed from most of our daily lives for so long we can barely remember there actually is a difference.