The graph depicts the 2008 Discretionary Budget Request as it existed at the first of this year. If you wonder why you have no money and the country's roads and bridges are falling apart, why New Orleans, one of America's oldest cities, is a landfill and many former residents are about to be put in the street to languish, you need look no further than this pie chart. I also like to show this to anyone who questions the viability of Social Security, a hair-thin yellow slice which is not only solvent but self-funded. Click on the image for a larger view. Millions of people depend on Social Security for their very existence. For those of us with no other income, it's an exceedingly meager existence, too. The Bush/Cheney conspiracy would love to cut that funding off and divert those proceeds to military spending, and let those people who depend on Social Security die of starvation.
Thomas Jefferson stated protecting the lives and happiness of the country's people was the only legitimate work of a government. That priority has been replaced by killing and profiteering. It didn't happen overnight. Of course you can't lay all the blame at Bush's door.
On the other hand, consider the leadership he's shown at making matters worse. He threatened Congress, guaranteeing them if they didn't (1) approve the 2008 defense budget, that part of the chart above, and (2) legalize his secret wiretapping scheme, the details of which he wasn't at liberty to divulge, that America would suffer a terrorist attack before they reconvened, and he'd blame it all on them.
• Associated Press:
The House approved modest changes to President Bush's record Pentagon budget proposal early Sunday, but Democrats signaled plans to resume a more contentious debate over the Iraq war after the August recess. [...]Pardon my language: I wonder, what kind of a fucking shithole acts like that? The defense budget is always no contest. Why was it such a big emergency all of a sudden? If I were speaker of the house, I'd tell the world and him to his face, "no, we aren't going to give you any of that, and we will initiate impeachment proceedings and not go on vacation until we've seen it through." Bush thinks whatever he says is what everyone will believe. He should be a little more careful.
The White House criticized Democrats for cutting Bush's request and effectively transfering $3.5 billion of the money to domestic spending programs. It is likely the cuts will be restored this fall when Congress passes another wartime supplemental spending bill. [...]
The massive military measure represents a nearly $40 billion increase over current levels. The Pentagon would get another several-billion-dollar budget increase through a companion measure covering military base construction and a recent round of base closures. [...]
Those huge procurement costs are driving the Pentagon budget ever upward. Once war costs are added in, the total defense budget will be significantly higher than during the typical Cold War year, even after adjusting for inflation.
• Newsweek reports approval for Bush's handling of the war in Iraq is at an anemic 24%. Eighty-four percent disapprove of his handling of our nation's recession. If I were Bush, I'd stop throwing matches at powderkegs. We're seeing serious challenges to the "support the troops" rhetoric for the first time:
• The New York Times:
It was a rewriting of history that made the blogosphere (and others) go berserk last week over an Op-Ed article in The Times, "A War We Just Might Win," by Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack. The two Brookings Institution scholars, after a government-guided tour, pointed selectively to successes on the ground in Iraq in arguing that the surge should be continued "at least into 2008."I seriously doubt people will believe any terrorist attack in the United States, however large or small, is anything but the work of Bush, Cheney and Rove. For their own sake, they should not author such a plan, and pray that nothing like that happens. The ship of state has almost descended to crush point.
The hole in their argument was gaping. As Adm. Michael Mullen, the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said honorably and bluntly in his Congressional confirmation hearings, "No amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference" in Iraq if there's no functioning Iraqi government. Opting for wishes over reality, Mr. O'Hanlon and Mr. Pollack buried their pro forma acknowledgment of that huge hurdle near the end of their piece.
But even more galling was the authors' effort to elevate their credibility by describing themselves as "analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq." That's disingenuous. For all their late-in-the-game criticisms of the administration's incompetence, Mr. Pollack proselytized vociferously for the war before it started, including in an appearance with Oprah, and both men have helped prolong the quagmire with mistakenly optimistic sightings of progress since the days of "Mission Accomplished."
You can find a compendium of their past wisdom in Glenn Greenwald's Salon column. That think-tank pundits with this track record would try to pass themselves off as harsh war critics in 2007 shows how desperate they are to preserve their status as Beltway "experts" now that the political winds have shifted. Such blatant careerism would be less offensive if they didn't do so on the backs of the additional American troops they ask to be sacrificed to the doomed mission of providing security for an Iraqi government that is both on vacation and on the verge of collapse. [...]
Mr. Bush created the template by doing everything possible to keep the sacrifice of American armed forces in Iraq off-camera, forbidding photos of coffins and skipping military funerals. That set the stage for the ensuing demonization of Ted Koppel, whose decision to salute the fallen by reading a list of their names in the spotlight of "Nightline" was branded unpatriotic by the right's vigilantes.
The same playbook was followed by the war's champions when a soldier confronted Donald Rumsfeld about the woeful shortage of armor during a town-hall meeting in Kuwait in December 2004. Rather than campaign for the armor the troops so desperately needed, the right attacked the questioner for what Rush Limbaugh called his "near insubordination." When The Washington Post some two years later exposed the indignities visited upon the grievously injured troops at Walter Reed Medical Center, The Weekly Standard and the equally hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial page took three weeks to notice, with The Standard giving the story all of two sentences. Protecting the White House from scandal, not the troops from squalor, was the higher priority.
One person who has had enough of this hypocrisy is the war critic Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations who is also a Vietnam veteran, a product of the United States Military Academy and a former teacher at West Point. After his 27-year-old son was killed in May while serving in Iraq, he said that Americans should not believe Memorial Day orators who talk about how priceless the troops' lives are.
"I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life," Professor Bacevich wrote in The Washington Post. "I've been handed the check." The amount, he said, was "roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning."
Anyone who questions this bleak perspective need only have watched last week's sad and ultimately pointless Congressional hearings into the 2004 friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman. Seven investigations later, we still don't know who rewrote the witness statements of Tillman's cohort so that Pentagon propagandists could trumpet a fictionalized battle death to the public and his family.
But it was nonetheless illuminating to watch Mr. Rumsfeld and his top brass sit there under oath and repeatedly go mentally AWOL about crucial events in the case. Their convenient mass amnesia about their army's most famous and lied-about casualty is as good a definition as any of just what "supporting the troops" means to those who even now beat the drums for this war.
