Wall Street Journal - "Obama and Gates Gut the Military"

[Median Democrat]

If you read this editorial, you might not notice that the U.S. spends more on defense than all nations combined, and that Gates' budget merely reduces the rate of growth in military spending. Yet, Senator James Inhofe is off saying that Obama is "disarming America" and you have the WSJ irresponsibly saying that President Obama is "gutting" the military.

I need to review my dictionary, because obviously the words "gut" and "disarm" no longer mean what I was taught they mean.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123914897083399179.html

/snip

On Monday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a significant reordering of U.S. defense programs. His recommendations should not go unchallenged.

In the 1990s, defense cuts helped pay for increased domestic spending, and that is true today. Though Mr. Gates said that his decisions were "almost exclusively influenced by factors other than simply finding a way to balance the books," the broad list of program reductions and terminations suggest otherwise. In fact, he tacitly acknowledged as much by saying the budget plan represented "one of those rare chances to match virtue to necessity" -- the "necessity" of course being the administration's decision to reorder the government's spending priorities.

However, warfare is not a human activity that directly awards virtue. Nor is it a perfectly calculable endeavor that permits a delicate "balancing" of risk. More often it rewards those who arrive on the battlefield "the fustest with the mostest," as Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest once put it. If Mr. Gates has his way, U.S. forces will find it increasingly hard to meet the Forrest standard.

/snip

[SpiralHawk]

1. "We want our massive war profits. Whine." - Republicon Cronies

More, more, more." - Republicon War-Profiteer Cronies

[Cha]

2. inhofe needs to be held

accountable for his accusations.

[maxsolomon]

3. if ever there was a part of the budget that needed gutting

it's the DoD.

if someone with real power ever actually tries to gut the pentagon's budget (say, reducing it by half to two-thirds), they better stay out of small planes & pay someone to open their mail.

[Born_A_Truman]

4. Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest??

Did the WSJ really quote him?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest

He is remembered both as a self made and innovative cavalry leader during the war and as a figure in the postwar establishment of the first Ku Klux Klan organization opposing the reconstruction era in the South.

[fujiyama]

11. Wow, I suppose I'd be surprised

but then again this is the same newspaper which called poor people "lucky duckies" due to paying fewer taxes.

And now of course, they're part of Murdoch's evil empire.

[Undercurrent]

5. Another heaping pile of

bs from the WSJ.

[jeanpalmer]

6. The Wall St Jounal is living

in the 19th century. Still peddling manifest destiny. Unable to face up to reality, like $12 trillion of debt.....It's one paper I want to see go under....Thank god it will....

[Rosa Luxemburg]

7. gutting means making an old dinosaur more efficient

[Jennicut]

8. Right so we really need all the projects the Defense Dept. is working on right now

Its total waste and designed for fighting a cold war style war, not insurgencies like we deal with now. Utter crap.

[LynnTheDem]

9. How is ADDING $21 BILLION to the defense budget "gutting" it?

Dumbest MFers on the planet,rightwingnuts; can't even understand simple math.

[Median Democrat]

10. Cheney, Gingrich, Inhofe, Now Giulani All Attacking President On Foreign Policy and Defense

The Military Industrial Complex may be winning the fight over Obama's cut, which is not a cut, but an increase in military spending. The right wing is continuing is repetition of the big lie that Obama is "gutting" the military budget, even though he is increase the budget by now continuing the Bush argument that dipomacy is weakness. Betweem spreading the lie that Obama is going to take their guns, to their lie that Obama is gutting the military, the right wing is 24 hour lie mode:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/08/giuliani-terrorists-think-they-can-push-obama/

/snip

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said Monday that President Obama emboldened terrorists and looked like a pushover in his recent videotaped remarks to the people of Iran.

"Sending a videotaped message into Iran and the language and tone of that message, in my view, is the kind of thing terrorists look at and say 'we can take advantage, we can push,'" Giuliani said on MSNBC.

"I think it was a mistake. It needed balancing language about his recognition of the complete lack of freedom within Iran, even as a strong message to the Iranian people," he said of the White House video, which was posted online last month. "You get one chance to talk to the people of Iran. They're watching. You want to create a reformist element in Iran and you don't speak to that?"

"This is why terrorist would say, 'we can take advantage of a guy like that,'" he said.

/snip