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Repugnant Warmongering
Let’s start with Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt’s vile op-ed at War Is Good for Business — aka the Wall Street Journal (emphasis mine):
On Monday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a significant reordering of U.S. defense programs. His recommendations should not go unchallenged.
In the 1990s, defense cuts helped pay for increased domestic spending, and that is true today. Though Mr. Gates said that his decisions were “almost exclusively influenced by factors other than simply finding a way to balance the books,” the broad list of program reductions and terminations suggest otherwise. In fact, he tacitly acknowledged as much by saying the budget plan represented “one of those rare chances to match virtue to necessity” — the “necessity” of course being the administration’s decision to reorder the government’s spending priorities.
However, warfare is not a human activity that directly awards virtue. Nor is it a perfectly calculable endeavor that permits a delicate “balancing” of risk. More often it rewards those who arrive on the battlefield “the fustest with the mostest,” as Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest once put it. If Mr. Gates has his way, U.S. forces will find it increasingly hard to meet the Forrest standard.
Donnelly and Schmitt do not tell us why it’s wrong or inappropriate to “match virtue to necessity” — especially when the necessity (domestic spending) has been neglected for so many years in order to pay for military programs that don’t address real defense needs and exist only or largely as a sop to the wildly, unimaginably lucrative weapons systems industry.
Put another way, Donnelly and Schmitt have some atrocious nerve when they accuse Gates of cutting defense spending to pay for domestic “entitlement” programs, when for the last eight years, the right has been gunning for limitless military spending with no accountability at the expense of every other real and legitimate need in this country — and just days after Republican “leaders” in Congress unveiled an “alternative” budget that called for rolling back the recently passed economic stimulus package and freezing ALL new non-military spending for five years.
Now, if we had actually gotten something valuable from having a separate, off-the-books budget for war spending during the Bush administration — like, oh, say, the capture of Osama bin Laden, increased respect and admiration for Americans around the world and for democratic values in general, reduced levels of terrorism, a greater sense of well-being and safety at home, and a lowered risk of more terrorist attacks in the United States — maybe all that spending would have been worth it.
As it is, however, we are being asked to continue starving the human needs of our own people — and, indeed, to worsen the suffering and deprivation — in order to transfer all of the economic resources Barack Obama is proposing to spend on (and has already allocated to) unemployed, economically dislocated Americans drowning in an ocean of bills and debt that cannot be paid, foreclosures and evictions, losing health insurance or not having had it to begin with, waiting for hours at food pantries and in welfare offices (and believe me, I know whereof I speak), to good-for-nothing missile defense programs and defense contractors who the only thing they are drowning in is miles and piles of legal tender.
And yes, I know that’s a run-on sentence and could use a little grammatical reworking, but it expresses what’s going on in my head and in my heart the way I want it to.
13 Responses to “Repugnant Warmongering”
Pure genius is Obama and the democrats.
Fight a war……but cut the military budget. Then pass a budget that quadruples our last years budget deficits and proclaim its necessary. Sorta like Reagan and Bush and Bush all did.
Genius. How else are we going to pay for all this crap that the lefties want? I say cut our military to the size of Panama's and ask Canada to protect us. If he wants to do this rightt Im thinking now is the time to pull out of all our foreign bases and let the world have the new world currency they are asking for.
In the meantime the USA collapses and Barak Obama with a compliant congress is elected to 4(life??) terms as King of America while he assigns everyone an universal number to get both health care and get on the internet………Im betting his number is 666.
Genius. Pure genius.
Gates’ proposed 2010 defense budget of $534 billion is up 4% from last year.
Good article, Kathy. There is a boatload of waste in the bloated military budget, and even with all that high tech gear the defense contractors are so fond of, we have proven to the world (and to at least some of us at home) that we can't even subdue a third world country like Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. 50 years of failure at fighting today's wars. The neocons are still fighting the cold war with antimissile tactics as if “keeping us safe” still means protecting against ICBMs. That's not the threat. The threat is an unstable world, hatred of America, low-tech tactics like dirty bombs and conventional suicide attacks against still-unprotected power plants, chemical plants, water supplies, etc.
The future of America is in building a green economy that allows us to be as self-reliant as possible with sustainable growth and independent renewable power sources. And much as the right hates the idea of ordinary people having such essentials as health care and housing (and not through foolish NINJA loans, but an effective safety net for those who are falling through the cracks). we do need to focus on securing a life and an education for all Americans. We can't blast our way to safety. We need the kind of vision that the Democrats are offering, the GOP is fighting, and 83% of Americans favor.
GD:
I know you'll get a lot of flack from the reliable sources, but I thank you for putting it so succintly—and correctly. (almost said “rightly” Ooops!)
GD:
I will second what Dorian said. Thanks, GD.
>>Fight a war……but cut the military budget….
…except that is flat-out incorrect. The defense budget is actually *increasing* from $513bn to $534bn.
If you can't even get this basic fact right, then how can anyone take you seriously?
“Obama gutted the defense budget”, while in reality , as has been mentioned twice already the defense budget is being increased.
Oklahoma Senator Inhofe tried the same dirty trick–the same lie–from a tarmac in Afghanistan.
Shame on him!
If you can't even get this basic fact right, then how can anyone take you seriously?
I am responding to the OPS post. Sometimes its so frustrating to have an iq of 170. I forget people cannot keep up with my intellectual superiority.
Put another way, Donnelly and Schmitt have some atrocious nerve when they accuse Gates of cutting defense spending to pay for domestic “entitlement” programs, when for the last eight years, the right has been gunning for limitless military spending with no accountability at the expense of every other real and legitimate need in this country — and just days after Republican “leaders” in Congress unveiled an “alternative” budget that called for rolling back the recently passed economic stimulus package and freezing ALL new non-military spending for five years.
Let me try to get you on track here. The left wants to up military spending by 4 percent. Yet the budget deficit increases by roughly 365 percent. So those entitlement programs are going to get a hefty 161 percent increase while defense spending goes up by 4 percent. Essentially gutting the military in a time of war while doing the exact same thing that the democrats reviled while Bush was president…………Having a war but failing to make the sacrifices necessary to fight it.
Hence we have a nation under Democratic tutelage that is willing to spend us into the poor house, raise the military a pittance and then shift the debate to a lie. A lie perpetuated by both sides.
What is that lie? The lie is that while in truth we have increased spending on the Military the fact is that this is nothing more then smoking mirrors designed to stir a debate which the Democrats will win while hiding the real truth that spending will increase 365 percent but that the defense budget will only increase by a mere 4 percent.
Great talking point but nothing but deception and smoking mirrors to hide a democratic agenda that does exactly what the OP pointed out………..correct imbalances despite the fact that we cannot afford them. Never mind how we got here or whose fault it is. We are here. Time to fix the problems not create more problems.
Thus my contention that we disband the military to the point of needing Canada to defend us because quite honestly. We are broke.
>>he lie is that while in truth we have increased spending on the Military the fact is that this is nothing more then smoking mirrors designed to stir a debate which the Democrats will win while hiding the real truth that spending will increase 365 percent but that the defense budget will only increase by a mere 4 percent.<<
Comparing apples to oranges – for a more valid comparison, you should compare the year-over-year military budget to the year-over-year overall budget – not the deficit.
Military budget FY2009 to 2010: $513bn to $534bn (4% increase)
Overall budget FY2009 to 2010: $3.10tn to $3.60tn (16% increase)
It must be rather embarrassing for someone with such avowed intellectual superiority to make such a basic mistake.
Oh, and “nothing more then smoking mirrors”? Seriously? I know pointing out grammar/spelling errors (I've seen several in your posts) is kinda cheap, but if you're going to keep repeating how brilliant you are, then it's fair game. Intelligence means nothing if you can't express yourself properly.
Thank you for playing. Please come back when you can compose a cogent and reasoned argument.
Do you mean “smoke and mirrors?”
WTF are smoking mirrors?
And you think you're a genius?
Best laugh I've had all day.
Braindead says:
” Sometimes its so frustrating to have an iq of 170. I forget people cannot keep up with my intellectual superiority.”
Perhaps you should try to come down to the IQ level of us poor slobs, braindead, so that we can understand where you are coming from, and where you are going.
With your 170 IQ, that should be a piece of cake for you.
Thanks
still laughing about braindead's supposed big IQ.
ponder this, genius. We've spent more in Iraq than the *lifetime* wages all but the top few % of Iraqis. We could have bought every weapon and hired every Iraqi for much less. Military solutions aren't working and even geniuses of a certain persuasion, or a certain fear level, just don't get it. If we had sacrificed 16 times more blood and treasure in Iraq (as we did in Vietnam), we still couldn't force a Western style democracy down their throats.
I wonder who spend like 50% on the military- USA. This sounds like a bad investment to me.