Interesting

I think that it's pretty dangerous to assume that God would support your political agenda over your opponent's.

After all, isn't that what Al Queda believes?

The Taliban believes that as well.

So did the puritans who burned witches in Salem....

And the Spanish Inquisition ...

Come to think of it, the Confederacy beleived that God suported their cause because they though that slavery was condoned by the Bible...

i think it is great to allow your faith to inform your vote. one's faith informs everything one does (be that a faith that science and reason can solve everything, or that God is going to take care of things, or some blend, or whatever.) "Faith" is not a simple thing, and neither is "inform." A vote is a pretty black and white thing, and that is where it gets tricky.

There is no simple answer, and people of faith can and will come to carefully worked out decisions on who to vote for.

The problem comes when people get all self-righteous about having God on their side, as "a" points out.

The Spanish Inquisition was a political court, not a religious one. It was contemporaneous with the English Court of the Star Chamber, and served a similar purpose.

The Puritans did not burn witches. They did indeed execute nineteen of them, mostly by hanging. This was at approximately the same time that Isaac Newton believed in sorcery. Nevertheless, a committee of Puritan ministers from other towns came to reason with the folks in Salem, and brought an end to the fear and the trials.

If we're interested in the anthropology and the history of the matter, cultural groups turn inward at times of stress. The ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia was cited, a the time it occurred, as an example of this phenomenon. On the other hand, if we want to prove that we are open minded and smarter than folks in the past, we can cite silly cliches of pseudohistory, as we learned them from television.
People who think we are the American Taliban have clearly never been in a conservative church when the people in pulpit and pew offered up prayers for the terrorists.

It is true that our troops are defending Christian values, like not murdering people who disagree with your politics. Some Muslims say that this is also a Muslim value. We shall see. But thhe Christian values being defended in the ME are also the values of Atheists and Jews in America. It might have been wise, or not, to go to war. It might have been a war for oil, although that would have been pretty unwise, since Saddam offered to sell us all the oil we wanted, at prices almost as low as he offered the French.But it is pimple-faced sloganeering to say that Bush is the head of an Americna Taliban.