Jim Pinkerton had an interesting piece in yesterday’s Outlook section. He makes much of the old chestnut, “War is the health of the state.” But I don’t see the connection Pinkerton tries to draw between the war on terror and the other big-government initiatives we’re seeing, e.g. the prescription drug benefit. The fact is that Bush would have gone along with such an entitlement expansion even if he weren’t fighting the war on terror, and those Democrats who are most dovish want an even bigger entitlement. There isn’t any logical, and needn’t be any political, inconsistency between supporting the war on terror and small government generally. This fact is obscured because we have a president who has been willing, at least to this point, to make almost no tough choices on the budget.