Is Sarah Palin Really This Clueless?
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.
Elaine Bergstrom
Amen! What is astonishing is how forgetful the GOP, in particular, is about how defense spending can bankrupt a country. Reagan amped up the cold war and, most of his party agree, brought down the communist government. With no enemy, we have, as Pogo said, made it ourselves and our own stupid paranoia. Sadly, the Dems are missing the mark on this. It would be such an ideal time to cut the DD hardware and up the spending on the troops, many of whom are coming home terribly wounded. It would be, at least, a start.
Comment on Aug 9th, 2010 at 8:16 am
tcarpenter
The GOP has moved a long way–in entirely the wrong direction–from the days of Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, in which he warned about the excessive influence of the military-industrial complex. Imagine! A Republican who worried that we might be too deferential to the budget goals of the Pentagon and its defense-contractor and congressional allies. The 50th anniversary of that speech is coming up in January, and that would be a good time for all Republicans to read it–and think about it.
Comment on Aug 9th, 2010 at 6:00 pm