Sarah Palin has already acquired a reputation of being George W. Bush or Dan Quayle in a skirt. In other words, there is a suspicion that there isn’t a lot of activity between her ears. Her latest comment on the bloated U.S. “defense” budget won’t dispel those suspicions.
Palin has made it her mission to dissuade Tea Party activists from making the $700 billion military budget a candidate for cuts to reduce the enormous federal budget deficit. Even though the United States now spends as much on the military as the rest of the world combined, Sarah regards it as shockingly unpatriotic to think that the Pentagon might be able to get by on a mere $500 billion or $600 billion a year.
During a recent speech, she quoted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who had questioned the need for some of the U.S. Navy’s expensive weapons systems, including maintaining 12 aircraft carrier battle groups. Noting that destroyers cost as much as $6 billion each, submarines $7 billion, and aircraft carriers $11 billion, he asked: “Do we really need [even] more strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?”
It was a very good question that deserved a serious, thoughtful answer. But what was Palin’s brilliant response? ” Well, my answer is pretty simple: Yes we can and yes we do, because we must.”
So, no possible enemy that the United States faces–now or in the foreseeable future–can match even a small fraction of our conventional military power, America’s free-riding allies in Europe and East Asia are slashing their already anemic defense budgets (thereby expecting the United States to bear an even greater share of the burden for global order and security), and we’re running a budget deficit of more than $1.4 trillion this year, but we can’t cut even a dime from our military budget. Right.
The best thing the Tea Party movement could do is to show the door to Sarah Palin and anyone who thinks the way she does.
Just when you think that the guardians of airport security, the TSA (Terminally Stupid Agency), can’t get any more obnoxious in the way that it treats hapless airline passengers, along comes this little gem. The arrogant TSA bureaucrats have now moved beyond frisking grandmothers and small children as possible terrorists and are now humiliating amputees as part of the airport screening process. Ah, our tax dollars at work. Our civil liberties RIP.
Yes, our zealous educational bureaucrats are at it again. This time, yet another school in Texas imposed a bizarre, one-week suspension on an elementary school student. Her offense? Possession of a Jolly Rancher’s candy that a friend had given her. It seems the healthy food police insist that possession of such evil contraband was a blatant violation of the rules and could not go unpunished.
Now, I love Texas. My wife and I lived in the state for 14 years in the 1970s and 1980s, and we plan to have our primary retirement home there. But after this latest incident, I was beginning to wonder if there was something in the water supply that was causing Texans to lose all semblance of good judgment. (It could also explain why they inflicted both Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush on the nation.)
It soon became apparent, though, that the loss of common sense is not unique to Texas schools. School administrators in Georgia suspended an autistic student for drawing a stick figure gun with a caption that implied he would like to shoot his teacher. Not only did he receive a suspension, he now faces possible felony charges. Although the child is 14 years old, his parents and others insist that he has the mental capacity of a third grader. Nice way to show compassion and a sense of proportion, Georgia bureaucrats.
Last month, I spent nearly three weeks in Australia and New Zealand. In addition to delivering some speeches on U.S. foreign policy, especially the future of America’s role in East Asia, I held a number of meetings with defense and foreign ministry officials in both countries. Three important insights emerged from those meetings. First, although Australia and New Zealand have crucial economic ties with China, they are also increasingly nervous about Beijing’s growing power. Second, despite repeated assurances from U.S. officials and nongovernmental foreign policy experts from America that everything is just fine and that Washington will keep military forces in East Asia and take care of the region’s security problems (as it has since the end of World War II) forever and ever, the Aussies and Kiwis look at our enormous federal budget deficits and have major doubts about those assurances. Third, since they believe that U.S. military retrenchment is likely at some point, they want both India and Japan to play larger security roles in the region. Otherwise, they fear that China will become totally dominant.
I found their thinking far more realistic than the drivel that passes for foreign policy analysis in the U.S. government and most American think tanks. My reflections on the meetings and my analysis of East Asia’s security situation and the choices facing America’s allies can be found here and here.
Vice President Dick Cheney always impressed me as the most dangerous and vicious member of the Bush administration. He seemed to regard war as the answer to every foreign policy problem, and his contempt for the Constitution and civil liberties was legendary.
But his daughter, Liz Cheney, seems determined to outdo her father with respect to both of those repulsive attitudes. She is fast becoming my least favorite Cheney.
Her organization, which has become a prominent lobbyist for war with Iran, has now taken dead aim at supposed terrorist sympathizers in the Obama administration. Television ads are now running attacking the president for appointing officials to the Justice Department who had previously served as defense counsels–or even just peripheral members of defense teams–for accused terrorist suspects. Smearing those attorneys as the “Al Qaeda Seven,” the ad implies that such legal work should disqualify them from appointments to office.
That is a “guilt by association” attack that would have made Senator Joseph McCarthy (who was notorious for such tactics) blush. And it is an especially ugly tactic in this case. Lawyers are expected to be willing to defend even odious individuals, and they routinely do so. That is part of the code of their profession. It is appallingly unfair to hold that duty against them, much less to imply that they endorse the values of those individuals. Moreover, just because someone is accused of being a terrorist does not necessarily mean that the person is one. That’s why our justice system requires fair trials–and defense attorneys.
If the logic of Liz Cheney and her cohorts was correct, John Adams, America’s second president, should have been disqualified from ever holding any office of trust. After all, he was the defense lawyer for the British Redcoats involved in the Boston Massacre. Got an acquittal, too. Wonder what Liz and her smear artists have to say about that episode?
The good news is that decent conservatives have rebuked Cheney for her odious tactics. People should not have their patriotism or integrity impugned because they uphold the core principles of our legal system. That she would do so says all we need to know about Liz Cheney and her neoconservative associates.
The good people of New York City have been saved from a pint-size criminal. It seems that Patrick Timoney, a fourth grade student at PS 52, dared to bring a weapon to school. That weapon was a 2-inch plastic gun from his Lego set. The PS 52 principal lectured young Patrick about the evil nature of his offense and threatened him with suspension.
Now, one might simply write-off this incident as the over-reaction of one school bureaucrat, except that a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education subsequently defended the action. She stressed that the district had a “zero tolerance” policy for weapons, real or toy, brought on school grounds. Apparently the district also has a zero common sense policy. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature should be able to tell that a two-inch Lego is not a weapon.
And these people are paid to educate our children?
Just when you think the “security” measures at the airports can’t get any more absurd, along comes this gem. It seems that the latest terrorist suspect is an 8-year-old Cub Scout, Michael “Mikey” Hicks. The practitioners of security theater (taking highly visible measures to make travelers feel safer without actually making them safer) are alert to the dire menace that he poses. They might have failed to stop the underwear bomber from getting on the plane, despite numerous warning signals, but they’re not about to ignore this lethal threat. Little Mikey is on their watch list, and they subject the poor kid to a pat down whenever he and his parents try to fly. Apparently, he has the same name as a real terror suspect. But wouldn’t you think that reasonably intelligent adults could figure out that an 8-year-old is not the person they’re looking for? Oh, wait… we’re talking about the TSA, where no intelligent adults need apply.
An update to last month’s decision by a school board in Mesquite, Texas to impose an in-school suspension on a four-year-old boy for the heinous crime of having long hair. You can always count on bureaucrats, especially public school bureaucrats, to stick to a dumb policy no matter how much the evidence mounts that it’s a dumb policy. True to form, the educational bureaucrats in Texas have offered a “compromise” to the parents of young Taylor Pugh, the miscreant who insists on maintaining a long hair style. They can braid his hair–as long as the braids don’t come past his ears.
How a boy with braids is less of a “distraction” in the classroom (the official justification for the suspension) than a boy with long hair, I will leave it up to the Texas hair police to explain. If this is the best that so-called educators can do with their time, I know a way that the hard-pressed Texas state budget could save some money. Eliminate those positions and divert back to the state treasury whatever funds are used to pay for them.
Repeat after me: We are not the Taliban. We should not try to dictate hair styles.
If you saw this story, you might assume that you slipped back in time to 1959. The educational bureaucrats of Texas have suspended a boy–a preschooler, no less–for having excessively long hair. The tot actually looks quite dapper–at least in any civilized part of the country. Furthermore, he was growing his hair so that he could later have it cut and donated to a charity that provides wigs to cancer victims who have lost their hair from chemotherapy treatments. One would think that he would receive praise, not be bullied, for such a generous impulse.
Even if charity had not been his motive, such idiotic regimentation should have disappeared by the end of the 1960s. But apparently it hasn’t in certain authoritarian precincts in the South. I have a suggestions for the Texas hair police, who apparently believe that every young male ought to look like he’s planning to have a career in the Marines. You have enough of a challenge educating the next generation, and most of the public schools aren’t doing a very good job at that task. Stop trying to dictate such things as grooming preferences. This is supposed to be a free country, and you might at least try to maintain that illusion a little longer with respect to your students.
President Obama will address the American people on Tuesday night regarding Afghanistan. Reports have leaked out over the past week that he will announce that he is sending additional troops into that quagmire. The only question seems to be whether he will send 30,000, 40,000 or some number in between. That is, frankly, not a very important issue. And for all of his talk about “off ramps” for the United States if the Afghan government does not meet certain policy targets or “benchmarks,” the reality is that he is escalating our commitment. Since Obama has repeatedly asserted that the war in Afghanistan is a war of necessity, not a war of choice, his talk of off ramps is largely a bluff–and the Afghans probably know it.
I am in the process of co-writing a book that includes a chapter on America’s disastrous war in Vietnam. I’m the first to acknowledge the hazards of equating one historical event with a development in a different setting and time period. In fact, the tendency of U.S. leaders to view every conflict in the world over the last 60 years through the prism of the failure to stem Nazi aggression in the 1930s has been a major cause of policy disasters like Vietnam and Iraq. And I don’t want to imply that what Obama is doing is exactly the same as the foolish strategy that the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations adopted in Southeast Asia during the 1960s. But there are a couple of very disturbing similiarities. In both cases, U.S. leaders opted to try to rescue a failing war by sending in more troops. And in both cases, Washington found itself desperately searching for a “credible” leader who could serve as an effective partner in the war effort. The United States never found such a leader in Vietnam. From the first client, Ngo Dinh Diem, to the last leader of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, American policymakers were frustrated by a parade of repressive, corrupt, and ineffectual political figures. Now, doesn’t that sound more than a little like the problem the Bush and Obama administrations have encountered with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government?
That fact alone suggests that our Afghanistan mission is not likely to turn out well.
Instead of escalating, Obama should move to rapidly draw-down our forces and narrow the mission to one of trying to harrass Al Qaeda and keep it off balance. My colleague, Malou Innocent, and I published a Cato Institute White Paper, “Escaping the Graveyard of Empires,” describing how to achieve that goal without pursuing the futile objective of nation-building in Afghanistan.