Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)
Fewer Nukes a Step In the Right Direction
People! Have we learned nothing from "Dr. Strangelove?"By Bob Wire, 3-02-10
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| If you see this on the horizon, all your carbon offsets won't mean squat. | |
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The big news today is that President Obama wants to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal. That’s a good start. He might just earn that Nobel Peace Prize yet. Now how about doing the same thing with the rest of the military-industrial complex?
Current headlines may point at the bloated health care/insurance miasma as the biggest drain on our tax dollar, but compared to the defense budget, that’s just an election-year hockey puck being batted back and forth by the clueless boobs in Congress. Meanwhile, the defense department lumbers merrily along, sucking up half of this country’s resources into its gaping maw like Homer Simpson at a donut bar.
Bear with me, if you have some gray in your palette. First off, if you follow my column, it should come as no surprise that I’m an Obama supporter. I like his leadership ability, I like the dignity and thoughtfulness he brings back to the office of President, and I like his combination of JFK populism tempered by a real Clinton/Gore enthusiasm for policy and details. Plus, he’s comfortable with the longview. But, despite what the tea party crowd and the Christian right would have you believe, not all of Obama’s supporters are giddy with blind faith, the way some of them are with, say, Sarah Palin.
No, I disagree with a few of the POTUS’s moves in the last year, most notably the decision to intensify the war in Afghanistan. Operation Big Rodeo Belt Buckle, or whatever rah-rah name they’re calling it, began as a misguided and tardy response to the 9/11 attacks. If you were paying attention to the Bush family bedmates at the time, you’d know that a couple of phone calls to Saudi Arabia on Sept. 12th would have provided more answers than ten years of bombing the living shit out of a dusty nation full of poor goat farmers.
And where has Operation Enduring Defense Contract got us? At first, there was some short term success when the Taliban regime was driven from power. Without their support, Al-Qaeda terrorists scuttled into the hills the way cockroaches go under the fridge when you come into the kitchen for a midnight corndog. Head war gamer G.W. Bush, when not proclaiming Mission Accomplished, poured hundreds of billions of dollars into both the Iraq war (Operation Dude Where’s My Oil) and the Afghanistan war. More than five thousand American soldiers, and over a hundred thousand civilians have died in both wars. But for all his chest beating and blowhard Texan cracker boasting, Bush couldn’t find the one guy he really wanted to see dead: Osama bin Laden, the admitted mastermind of the worst attack on the U.S. in our history. (Here’s a thought—why didn’t they put the Recording Industry Association of America on the case? Hell, they were able to track down a 12-year-old girl who was swapping songs on the internet and then hit her with an atomic lawsuit, suing her off the face of the earth.)
When Obama came through on one of his campaign promises by announcing a troop draw-down and eventual pullout in Iraq, he was delivering on the hope we all desperately needed. Despite the dire warnings by professional sorehead Dick Cheney that such a pullout would dangerously jeopardize the future profits of Halliburton, Blackwater, and other, uh, defenders of freedom, most Americans were glad to finally see the beginning of the end. All the bullshit arguments about “trying to stop a civil war” didn’t fool anyone who could read a paper and do math. Iraq is all about oil. Trying to stop a civil war in Iraq? Hello? They were having civil wars in that region when our forefathers were still getting kicked out of every decent country in Europe.
The giant, olive drab elephant in the room is the defense budget. Come on, do we really need to spend anywhere from a quarter to over one-half of all our national operating budget to defend ourselves? [The amount differs, depending on where you’re getting your numbers. On their all-organic website, the hippies at the War Resisters League put it at a whopping 54%. The rigidly conservative Heritage Foundation loudly trumpets the figure 4.4%, but that’s a percentage of the GDP, not the overall budget. Of course, anyone who believes the Heritage Foundation is too stupid to know the difference. Those crazy radicals over at Wikipedia have the figure at 23% of the budget.]
Who are we spending all this money to defend ourselves against? Are we expecting a Rocky Balboa-style comeback from the USSR? (“Yo, Adrian, I’m sittin’ on a warehouse full of hammer-and-sickle muscle shirts”). Get real. China? Sure, we owe them money, but all they need to do is send about a billion people over here with baseball bats to break our kneecaps until we give them a money order or hand over the keys to all our Wal-Marts.
Yes, you’ve got your nasty dictators figuring out their own nuclear weapons programs, like in Iran. Last month, President Ahmadinejad announced that Iran is now a “nuclear state.” But it’s all about power plants, he claimed. “If we wanted to build a nuclear bomb, we would announce it.” What? Broadcast your military plans and strategies? Nobody’s dumb enough to do that except the U.S.
And then you’ve got North Korea, run by that Kim Jong-il, who looks like your grandma after a hard night of drinking and mah jong. He, like Ahmadinejad, also claimed to be building nuclear plants to generate electricity. This was actually corroborated in 2006 when then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld produced a satellite photograph that showed the entire country of North Korea was powered by a single extension cord running down from Linjiang, China.
Yeah, the world is going crazy and everyone is racing to be the first to build a suitcase nuclear device and bring it into the U.S. and destroy the imperialist running dog/blasphemous sinner/freedom-loving infidel nation we’ve become. Actually, some of these rogue nations already have the weapon. The only thing stopping them is the ridiculous $30 fee airlines charge for checked luggage.
I think it makes more sense, and better serves the people of this wonderful county, to scale back on all the high-tech, overbuilt, overpriced military doohickeys that mostly sit around in warehouses until they’re obsolete and we have to dump them in the ocean to make an artificial reef. Bunker busters? Invisible bombers? Whisper copters? Sharks with frickin’ laser beams? None of that James Bond shit is doing us any good. We’re being outsmarted with box cutters, shoe bombs and small caliber underpants.
I say bring the defense budget back down to earth, and put more of our resources toward solving the real crises here that are happening now: An underfunded education system. The economic shitstorm and its attendant job crunch. Rising cancer rates and tainted food supplies. Urban crime and government graft. Global warming and dwindling fossil fuel reserves. Pat Robertson. Shrinking wildlife habitat, and disappearing water sources for us all. People sick and dying for lack of affordable health care.
What’s going to be the one threat that will finally wipe out our short-sighted, arrogant species? Hell, throw a dart. It could be any number of things. But it’s pretty unlikely that it will be a nuclear war. Give ‘em hell, Mr. President.
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Comments
yes bob i wish we didnt need a huge defense budget. but we do.
our politicians are inept fools. obama is no exception. congress's approval rating may go to a negative level soon. think about that. they are hell bent on spending us into oblivion, along with the defense budget increase.
but our citizens , on the left and right, are fed up. hopey, changey is taking on a new meaning.
Let’s give up all of our Nukes and set an example the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, and all of the other "non-belligerent" countries out there will follow.
How sadly naive is the liberal perception of the world...(America BAD....Rest of the world good, friendly folks oppressed by us Evil Yankee, imperialist bastards!) If only WE were nicer, correct??? Enough of this moral equivalence crap...Believe it or not Bobby Baby...there is difference between us and the NoKo's...just ask South Korea. Or look at that Sat. Pic of the Korean pen.
My greatest hope is that that over-hyped hemarriod with ears IS a one-termer. If you want to crawl a mile across broken glass to eat the corn of the guy's dukee, knock you self out. Get freaken tatoo...but he's in over his head. I'd be drinking and smoking if I were him to!
"We need a defense budget. We need a strong military. But what we spend now on that is overkill. Just because we've always done it that way doesn't make it right. Nuclear proliferation bad. Disarmament good."
Fear, paranoia and hate are not good motivators to make constructive decisions about the future of our country. Which is a wonderful country. I said so in the article.
If you choose to sweep the Bush years under the rug and blame all our problems on the current administration, you're just the kind of shallow, obstinate electorate that Sarah Palin and her ilk are counting on. Ridiculing people for having hope? For wanting to change a negative situation? Wow. That's the kind of shit that gives patriotism a bad name.
France generates 79 percent of its electricity from nuclear power; Belgium, 60 percent; Sweden, 42 percent; Switzerland, 39 percent; Spain, 37 percent; Japan, 34 percent; the United Kingdom, 21 percent; and the United States, 20 percent. With 434 operating reactors worldwide, nuclear power meets the annual electrical needs of more than a billion people.
Of course, nuclear power is not 100 percent safe. Nothing is. But the relevant fact is that nuclear power is safer, and more environmentally friendly, than any feasible alternative.
All of a sudden it's like the "rants and raves" section of Montana Craigslist here, to wit:
Erik said,
"My greatest hope is that that over-hyped hemarriod with ears IS a one-termer. If you want to crawl a mile across broken glass to eat the corn of the guy's dukee, knock you self out."
I mean, you can't make that stuff UP!
Unfortunately, our struggling democracy can't seem to wipe that kind of stuff off its track shoes and get up to a steady jog forward either.
Defense budget...IS NOT about keeping us safe! All that $$$$ is about making some people wealthy. Bombing the living shit out of people who probly have never ridden in a car does not protect us....it only makes any surviving family member feel they have nothing to Lose....hence they turn to a short life of suicide bombing. Be very afraid...not of the terrorists in the ME...but the ones in the Marketing department..Oh Snap thats good!
On the other hand, I still see no other option than to have gone into the sandbox. My preference would have been to turn Tora Bora to green glass, or at least have produced Osama's carcass. And if any of the small nuke nations, the belligerents, actually fire and detonate a nuke, I would be perfectly happy to push the button myself.
As for conventional warfighting, or even irregular warfare, I would much prefer that our troops be given the overwhelming advantage in firepower and technology. Our soldiers are Americans, exceptional in every way, and we should support them with the tools (including rules of engagement, duh) they need to win and come home.
In my mind, Obama's presidency is already a success. Sure, he's had a whole host of domestic troubles. But Pakistan was teetering on the edge of becoming a failed state, and the Taliban was less than 50 miles from Islamabad. Pakistan has nukes. If the Taliban and/or Al Quaida got a hold of nucler weapons, we'd have no choice but to invade Pakistan and get them back. I imagine that wouldn't go well.
Instead, Obama's aid package to Pakistan seems to be paying off. The Pakistanis are actively capturing Taliban and Al Quaida operative. Obama has struck the delicate balance with the Pakistani government where we can still continue our extremely effective drone attacks without them losing the support of the people.
I entirely agree about reducing nuclear weapons. No one wins a nuclear war, and I'm not cynical enough yet to want to take everyone else down with me. However, I trust our President with national security and the defense budget. I think people a whole helluva lot smarter than me are working on it.
There were fewer Obamanites than usually pop up; but all in all you put the burrs where they would do the most good.
Anything which moves people from faith or fear to actual thinking has got to be a step in the right direction...