Well…if you remember back a few months, there was this long, drawn out negotiation that led to the debt ceiling being raised and the repubs agreed to cuts in the Pentagon budget while the dems agreed to some cuts to the social safety net…a necessary compromise to keep the government from defaulting on its debts. Now, though, we have the repubs in the House reneging on the agreement by proposing that the Pentagon cuts be restored and paying for them by taking an axe to programs like food stamps and others that help support the poor and middle class. When does the military/industrial complex have to sacrifice like the rest of us? And, when are the repubs going to think of the citizens of this country and not just the businesses that buy them their seats? It’s a matter of priorities and I think the repubs have theirs all wrong….cutting a few billion out of a bloated military budget won’t make us less safe…hell, we could save over 10 billion a month just by ending the Afghan war and bringing our troops home…so why don’t we do that instead of asking the poor and middle class to give up what little is left of their safety net? It’s this backwards thinking by the repubs that keeps us from rebuilding our roads and the rest of our country just so these chicken hawks can puff out their chests and scream “we’re number one”…..and you’ll get even more of that if more repubs are elected in the fall….geez…
Tag Archives: Military
Good riddance…
Well…as I advocated the other day…the President has removed General McChrystal from his position leading the effort in Afghanistan strongly reaffirming to this country and the rest of the world that the civilians are now and always will be in charge of our military. And, as more and more information comes out on this guy, what I said about him in the other post is also true: that this guy was just one of the tea partiers that could not accept that their side lost the election and was just throwing an immature fit like you see at all of the tea party rallies. Now, I know that some of you that read this are bosses…what would you do if one of your employees did what McChrystal did to the President? If one of your brightest engineers, for example, spent his break or work time bad-mouthing you to the rest of your team and showed you no respect? I’m sure you’d warn him that it wasn’t appropriate…but if he kept it up you wouldn’t tolerate it and would probably ask him or her to go somewhere else. Just what Obama did.
But, there is a larger danger here that has been ignored by our generation; a warning of which was given by an ex-general who was also president Eisenhower. “Beware the military-industrial complex”…to that I’ll add my own corollary…”Beware the hero worship of the military”. Many of the commentators seem to want to give the military a pass on everything with the right being the biggest cheerleaders…and yes they do sacrifice…but they also know what they are getting into when they sign up. It’s become almost like a religion to some folks and what the world doesn’t need is another religion…geez.