This week Allen Raymond, author of the just-released "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative," about his misadventures in the New Hampshire phone-jamming and other political scams, is all over the country and all over the airwaves these days talking about his book. While he served three months in prison for his crimes in New Hampshire, it is hard to say whether he suffers any remorse for his actions. In fact, in his discussion on TPM Café he actively dismisses any moral culpability, saying in essence morality is for chumps, not part of the discourse in hard-knuckled political campaigning.

To his credit, Raymond accepts responsibility for breaking the law, but in his curt dismissal of morality he lays bare the sickening delusion that informs the entire framework of conservative ideology from the trenches of electoral combat to the loftiest heights of policymaking. In the conservative universe all politics is war, and in war moral consideration is a handicap, principles are for losers. There is but one consideration: winning. As Raymond says, he was “hired to engineer victory…. morality was not a luxury to be afforded candidates or their staff.”

Allen Raymond and conservatives in general take comfort in not having to judge their individual actions in a moral/ethical light, for they have another imperative to judge themselves by: victory. This is just another “ends-justify-the-means” formulation, nothing new in the affairs of man, but conservatives have reconfigured the moral calculus to where morality is now a function more of identity than of actions and behavior. As members of the moral army, defending “Christian Family Values,” promoting the Ten Commandments or any other standard of God-sanctioned virtue, individual soldiers need not consider the morality of their actions, for they clearly, in spite of an occasional venality, are fighting for the good. Besides, in war stuff happens.

Blanket absolution for warriors, too, is nothing new in the affairs of man, but it is a bit surprising how adamant and successful this strategy of undeclared war has been for Republicans in helping them garner political power, if not policy success. Practically every Republican initiative is couched in the language of war, or is itself a literal war. And the battlefield is littered with Republican warriors who have been caught up in serious ethical compromise and who yet have emerged from the fires of scandal, Terminator-like, ready to take the fight to the enemy, from Dick Cheney to Alberto Gonzales to Larry Craig, and seemingly hundreds more. Every one of them is proudly unabashed by, if not utterly ignorant of, their personal moral failings.

Allen Raymond says “morality is the domain of organized religion, … but not government,” forgetting individual moral responsibility altogether. He demonstrates the moral development of a child. In a civilized society of adults, questions of the morality of one’s behavior are always in play at every level. And as an officer of an institution, whether church or government, one is responsible for upholding the letter of the laws they represent in exemplary fashion. This is a moral imperative, one that Republicans, in their unbridled disdain for government, have ignored at the peril of our democracy.

Conservative ideology in fact reverses the moral imperative of honorable conduct in high office, substituting it with a creed of selfishness. As Alan Raymond so aptly puts it “the bright line of the law [is to] be taunted but not crossed. Anybody who has a problem with that or doesn’t get it doesn’t understand America. America is about self interest, within the rule of law.” Conservatives have jettisoned the concept of personal responsibility, and in particular personal morality, for the sake of winning a war of self-interest they have silently declared against anyone who does not agree with them.

Rather than defend and uphold the parameters of any law or moral convention, conservative warriors look for advantage “taunting” the outer limits of what’s permissible. Rather than a paragon of the laws they represent, conservatives act like criminals looking for enforcement loopholes, they push the boundaries with all the zeal and sophistication of a two-year old who won’t accept the word “NO.” From corporate boardrooms to the halls of government, from Ken Lay to the subprime mortgage mess, from the Gonzales Justice Department to the “War” President, it’s all about taunting the law rather than respecting it. It’s all about winning. This is not a war of ideas; ideas require respectful discourse between adversaries. This is simply a war, waged by people who are convinced they are right and who respond to disagreement as an act of war.

We often hear from across the political spectrum people decrying “the bitter partisan divide in Washington.” But no one, neither pundit nor politician, seems to have a clue as to why this is happening. The answer is War. While conservatives would never have the courage to openly declare war, they prefer casting themselves as victims of others’ aggressions, it is their war that is the source of so much bitterness. Our democracy was built on the idea that respectful discourse and compromise among adversaries is the way to create a nation of laws. The conservative blitzkrieg on our government would spit on the notion of respect for their adversaries and actively frustrates the spirit of compromise through filibuster, signing statements, and outright disregard for the rule of law. These are bitter pills to swallow for anyone who still cares about democracy in America.