Sam, you can have any damn opinion you want to. But if you’re going to use bandwidth here, and expect people to take the time to respond to you, you had damn well better have your facts lined up qnd checked first and the possibility of your own prejudices acknowledged. You do neither, indulging only in the silly game of identifying anyone with a different view than yourself as “the enemy” and excoriating them.
If you want credit for understanding the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy, you had better well demonstrate that you know and accept them. Now would be a good time to start.
Try a little fucking responsibility, pal - if not toward the country you are so lucky to be a part of but which you show no apparent interest in protecting and developing (not on this board, anyway, but it would be welcome - we do any country here), but to the concept of honest and reasoned debate. At least pick a fight in which you have a dog, pal.
An even better example than the B-2 might be the B-1, which is already being phased out of service after having shown its essential uselessness and unfixability. Carter knew that when he cancelled it, but Reagan ignored it in his crusade to show America “riding tall in the saddle”. I don’t even want to know how many billions were wasted on that pig that could have been used for so many other things, including a military appropriate to the kind of conflicts we’re facing now.
But there are those who would still condemn Carter, the Democrats, and the dam’ liebrals for doing the smart thing. Pity.
Opposing one particular military expenditure does not make one “soft on defense”. But having a consistent pattern of opposing - or even being less supportive of, as a group - every or amost every proposed military expenditure or program does make one “soft on defence”, even if you have an “excuse” for each individual case.
I should note that I am not personally prepared to argue in this thread that the Democratic policy has been wrong (although I strongly incline to think that way). But that is an argument as to whether being “soft on defence” is justified. The fact that they are indeed soft on defence has been amply demonstrated by Sam in this thread. And - significantly - to the extent that the public feels that a “strong” defence is needed, they will trust the Republicans a lot more.
A simple matter, really. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You want to be soft on defence, take a stance. But don’t try to pretend that one of the unifying principles of the Democratic Party that the troops will rally around is going to be strong defence - That is silly.
And the same works against the Repubs with regard to matters like social programs - the Republicans have all sorts of excuses and theories behind their consistent oposition to these, exactly analogous to your jive about defence. But the bottom line is that if you are a person for whom social programs are a major priority, you don’t vote for the Republicans as the party of social spending.
It just happens that due to recent and current events, strong defence is a priority with a lot of voters these days, playing to the Republican strength and Democratic weakness. This could change.
And if that were the case, you would have a case. It is not, and you don’t.
For verification, simply look to Clinton’s proposed defense budgets in 1993 and 1994, when the Dems controlled both chambers of Congress and the presidency. He could have radically cut defense spending and weapons procurement. He did not.
Actually, now that I think about my word choice a little bit, I realize that Clinton couldn’t have radically cut defense spending even if he wanted to. The Democrats in Congress wouldn’t have let him.
I think that Republicans love it when Democrats try to outhawk them. They know that Dems can’t do it, and if they can define the debate in hawkish terms, they’ve already won.
Democrats need to go on the offensive. They need to say, “Look. This fighting-two-foreign-wars-simultaneously policy is crap, and it’s sucking money out of our economy to the tune of three hundred billion dollars a year. Tax-and-spend Republicans want to put more federal dollars into weaponry than into anything else. With a fraction of the money we put into the military every year, we could give universal health coverage to every expectant mother in the country. We could subsidize higher fuel-economy cars, so that smog doesn’t cause so many health problems.”
I’m proud not to be as hawkish as most Republicans. I’ve got no interest in supporting a military that can undergo unilateral action overseas: I want a military that’s good enough to defend our borders and to engage in cooperative multilateral foreign wars when absolutely necessary. I want the money we’d save by not pouring money into the military to go to education, to health care, to the environment – or back to taxpayers.
So yeah, Sam. I agree with you: Democrats can’t be, and shouldn’t be, as hawkish as Republicans, and as long as we let Republicans insist that we need a freakishly priapic army, we’ll lose the military debate. Democrats oughtta be talking about the alternatives to the gigantic military, not feeding it.
That’s why I added “less supportive of”. If you can show that the Republicans were pushing for greater cuts in military spending while Clinton and the Democrats did not let them, you’d have a bit of a case. But of course you can’t, because that’s not what happened.
What you have to remember is that “soft on defence” is a relative term, and what it is relative to is the Republican positions on these matters.
This is NOT the debate. The debate is, “Are the Democrats soft on defense?”
You Democrats denying this have provided ZERO evidence of Democratic support for the military. I, on the other hand, spent half the day studying voting records of Democrats, and could not find a single military issue on which they offered more support than the Republicans.
As far as I can tell, if the Democrats were in full control, the following weapons systems would not exist:
The B-2 Bomber
The F-117 Stealth Fighter
The Trident Submarine
The cruise missile
Sea-launched cruise missiles (opposed by 67% of Democrats)
The Arrow anti-missile system
The Patriot missile
The Aegis guided missile cruiser
The Maverick Anti-Tank missile
At LEAST two Nimitz-class aircraft carrier groups.
The Humvee (opposed by 78% of Democrats)
Stealth programs in general. For example, in 1982, when the first R&D requests for stealth technology came out, it was voted for by 100% of Republicans. The ONLY Democrat to vote for it was John Glenn.
In addition, there would be half the number of F-18’s, there would be a serious force reduction in Europe, and there would be about half the number of M1 Abrams tanks (if there would be any at all - the appropriations votes for those occured before the databases I found had records, but I found several defeated bills entered by and voted for by a majority of Democrats, calling for reductions in the tank inventory).
Yep, those Democrats are sure strong on defense.
See, I have this feeling that if Democrats had their way, you’d be in the kind of position Canada is in. We sent our soldiers to the Afghanistan desert in JUNGLE fatigues, rather than desert Camo, because our Liberal government decided that desert camo was a luxury our fighting boys could do without. So, they would have stood out like green targets on a brown landscape had they worn them. Luckily, the British government lent us clothes to wear to keep from being shot.
There are plenty of good reasons to believe that Democrats and other liberals are soft on defense.
This is correct, but it does not saying much. Any president since Eisenhower could have drastically cut what is euphemistically called “defense spending.” The term “defense” is a classic example of doublespeak. The Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense in 1947, when it became clear that the U.S. military would never again be used for defense. It is much harder to justify an increase in the “war budget” than an increase in the “defense budget.”
When liberals try to claim that the Democrats are not soft on defense, they make a serious error (assuming they care about the meaning of words) when they grant the Right the prerogative to define increased militarization and war spending as “defense.” In actuality, the course of action which leads to the Orwellian military budgets of the U.S. has nothing to do with “defense,” and in fact makes the nation much less secure.
A more accurate appraisal of the Democrats’ supposed “softness on defense” is a “less enthusiastic stance toward increased militarization and war spending.” Making an equivalence between the two is a serious error.
The federal budgets for 1994 and 1995 (Clinton’s first two budgets), by a Democratic president and approved by a Congress controlled entirely by Democrats, were well more than a quarter trillion (1996) dollars each year. That, my friend, is some serious support for the military.
SFW? The debate is not about who wants to spend more taxpayer money on the military. Clearly, the Republicans have made that a centerpiece of their taxcut and spend philosophy. The question is whether Democrats are soft on defense, and that is NOT a relative term.
The 1994 budget represented a drastic cut in military funding, and was supported by 96% of Democrats. This is what the opposition had to say:
The 1995 budget restored some funding, but it was opposed by 69% of Democrats in the Senate, and only passed because almost ALL Republicans voted for it (48-4).
Here’s a quote from what the Democrats who opposed it had to say:
The conference report for the 1995 defense appropriations bill added 1.7 billion to cover unfunded military needs, and was opposed by 76% of Democrats.
So, it looks like it was Bush Sr. who was soft on defense…He cut more deeply than Clinton did. (Unless you want to argue that cutting from 18 to 12 was fine but cutting from 12 to 10 was horrendous.)
Or, perhaps, both of these Presidents recognized the new realities of the world, where suddenly there was no longer any other nation spending anywhere near what we were spending on the military (and that the gap was even larger if you considered the relative technology capabilities), and reacted accordingly.
Oh bullshit, Sam. Those were the first post-Cold War budgets. Everyone was gleefully talking about the “peace dividend.” Of COURSE the military budget was going to shrink, just like the number of personnel was going to shrink. The only question was how much. Answer: Not much.
Table showing defense spending as % of GDP and % of federal budget. Note that the GDP drop from FY 1992 to FY 1993 (both Bush budgets) was a greater decline than from 1993 to 1994. Note further that military spending continued to decline throughout Clinton’s term, even though the R’s recaptured both chambers of Congress in 1994 and never gave 'em back.
Another chart demonstrating that the military budget cutting started during the reign of Bush the Elder.
Yet another chart, this one reflecting that the defense budget under Clinton declined from about $310 billion inflation-adjusted dollars in 1993 to $280 billion in 1996. My god, Democrats cut 9.5 percent from the defense budget after the end of the Cold War! The horror!
I could go on, but it would be just too damn pointless. You’ll just go on citing meaningless vote tallies without ever telling anyone how much money the Democrats wanted to spend instead, what context the vote was taken in, what the Democrats wanted to spend the dough on, or anything else necessary to evaluate the information. Nope, you’ll just continue to define anything less than the Republicans’ preferred level of military spending and support for the Republicans’ preferred weapons systems to be “soft on defense.” Hey, that kind of vile dishonesty has worked for your guys for the last three decades. Why stop now?
Among the other mistakes liberals make in the debate over “defense” spending is on the nature of war spending. “Defense” spending has nothing to do with actually defending the country, but it does have a lot to do with organizing the economy. The Pentagon system plays the same role in the U.S. that central organizing committes play in other countries.
Almost every dynamic sector of the economy in the U.S. is publicly financed through the Pentagon system. It is a mechanism to socialize the risks and costs of high-tech development, while funneling the profits into private hands.
The major difference in the central planning mechanisms of the U.S. and other industrial states is in the focus of the benefits of investment. In countries like Japan, central planning is geared around producing products that people can buy and use. In the U.S., central planning revolves around waste production. We pour hundreds of billions of dollars each year into building useless military junk, essentially waste. The benefit of this Keynesian economic approach is that it does help the economy by investing in industrial production that is not profitable, but it keeps the potential benefit of such production away from the working classes. So, instead of designing high-tech infrastructure or investing in bio-technology research that could actually help people, the products that come out of the Pentagon system have the main purpose of destroying things.
Imagine, if you will, how much good we could do with all of the resources we pour into waste production. The hundreds of billions we spend on useless military crap each year could be used to promote the general welfare, to eliminate poverty, to provide health care, to educate people, etc. I will repeat the quote I wrote earlier, which is actually taken from a speech of Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists and the hopes of its children.”
Ya know what, Chumpsky? We get it. You’re an enlightened, neo-Marxist kinda guy. Now run along and play while those of use who maintain some shred of political relevance discuss the issue at hand, m’kay?
No, they just want to continue buying $6,000 toilet seats for the Air Force’s fleet of “corporate jets.”
This item was probably a money saver. Allowing the services to lease jets as needed for transport of brass & dignitaries instead of owning and maintaining them through the notoriously inefficient military procurement process would probably save millions that could be better spent on $700 hammers.
