I’m mystified at the silence of the Panhandle’s faithful Republican residents, the folks who gave John McCain 80 percent of their vote in the 2008 presidential election.

They’ve been silent on the latest gaffe by their party’s chairman, Michael Steele. National Republicans, such as Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Sen. McCain himself have called for Steele’s head over remarks he made the other day in which he described the Afghanistan war as President Obama’s “war of choosing” and said the war was all but unwinnable, given history’s record of failed military efforts in that primitive land.

Steele’s utterance, of course, shows tremendous ignorance at a couple of levels. First of all, it wasn’t Obama’s war to begin with; the war began on President Bush’s watch. And it surely wasn’t a war of choice, since the first hostile act came from terrorists headquartered in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, national Democrats are keeping silent. They aren’t saying anything about whether Steele should remain as head of the RNC. They no doubt want the GOP’s human gaffe machine to stay right where he is.

But out here, in Flyover Country, where Republicans rule the roost, our rank-and-file electorate remains amazingly quiet over Chairman Steele’s latest bout of foot-in-mouth disease. The many Republican partisans throughout the Panhandle who are so quick to criticize the Democrats in Congress, and the one in the White House, need to speak up now.

Do they want Steele to stay or go?