Posted on 05/24/2010 10:02:37 AM PDT by rabscuttle385
Congress, with its insatiable appetite for spending, is set to pass yet another “supplemental” appropriations bill in the next two weeks. So-called supplemental bills allow Congress to spend beyond even the 13 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government. These are akin to a family that consistently outspends its budget, and therefore needs to use a credit card to make it through the end of the month.
If the American people want Congress to spend less, putting an end to supplemental appropriations bills would be a start. The 13 “regular” appropriations bills fund every branch, department, agency, and program of the federal government. Congress should place every dollar in plain view among those 13 bills. Instead, supplemental spending bills serve as a sneaky way for Congress to spend extra money that was not projected in budget forecasts. Once rare, they have become commonplace vehicles for deficit spending.
The latest supplemental bill is touted as an “emergency” war spending bill, needed to fund our ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. The emergencies never seem to end, however, and Congress passes one military supplemental bill after another as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on.
Many of my colleagues argue that Congress cannot put a price on our sacred national security, and I agree that the strong, unequivocal defense of our country is a top priority. There comes a time, however, when we must take stock of what our blank checks to the military industrial complex accomplish for us, and where the true threats to American citizens lie.
The smokescreen debate over earmarks demonstrates how we have lost perspective when it comes to military spending. Earmarks constitute about $11 billion of the latest budget. This sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the $708 billion spent by the Pentagon this year to expand our worldwide military presence. The total expenditures to maintain our world empire is approximately $1 trillion annually, which is roughly what the entire federal budget was in 1990!
We spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined, and far more than we spent during the Cold War. These expenditures in many cases foment resentment that does not make us safer, but instead makes us a target. We referee and arm conflicts the world over, and have troops in some 140 countries with over 700 military bases.
With this enormous amount of money and energy spent on efforts that have nothing to do with the security of the United States, when the time comes to defend American soil, we will be too involved in other adventures to do so.
There is nothing conservative about spending money we don’t have simply because that spending is for defense. No enemy can harm us in the way we are harming ourselves, namely bankrupting the nation and destroying our own currency. The former Soviet Union did not implode because it was attacked; it imploded because it was broke. We cannot improve our economy if we refuse to examine all major outlays, including so-called defense spending.
Sorry, you'll have to deal with that, cause it's true.
And saying Palin has "many truthers" in her corner might be the most laughable post of the day........
Yea but Paul’s ‘blame America’ mentality fits perfectly with his Truther and CodePink base.
>has “many truthers” in her corner might be the most laughable post of the day........>
Paul’s comments are in transcript, youtube, etc.
He claims 9/11 was blowback for what we have done.
That is right out of the Far Left.
Paul’s support for Chuck Baldwin for Pres. in 08 was also typical as
Baldwin is another major Truther.
Blame America? Strange wording there. Paul does not “blame America.” He blames the government. I thought that was what the tea party movement was all about. If you, on the other hand, believe that “America” and the “federal government” are the same thing, we disagree. That is the same kind of argument used against Rush when he said he wanted the federal government under Obama to fail.
I call it as I see it. Ron Paul does blame America for the War on Terror. He claims that if Americans weren’t over there that they wouldn’t have attacked us. He is a Code Pink type of politician. He is not someone who upholds the spirit of the Founders but is a pretender.
The TEA party is not at all about creating a weak National Security or about spouting propaganda blaming America in the war on terror. It is about returning to a strong America built upon rugged individualism, limited government, adherence to the Constitution and a strong National defense.
The Defense Department is largely made up of the same caste of career bureaucrats that make up Health and Human Services, the IRS, and Post Office. Do you really think that a wildly spent $700 billion makes us safer than a wisely spent $250 billion? It all comes down to the quality of the individuals doing the work - just like the public schools. Dollars are not the determining factor in success, though everyone who is getting a cut will scream that they are.
You guys argue as if Ron Paul had suggested cutting the military budget to zero - which is the exact same type of non-sequitur liberals like to use when social welfare or school spending is threatened. We don't have to be robbed by layers upon layers of rent-seekers just to have a secure nation.
It wasn’t those of us that criticize Paul’s foreign policy that brought up military spending, it was Paul himself that claims to want to cut it along with his ‘blame America’ foreign policy that claims that Iran has every right to nuclear weapons. The guy is just an idiot.
I am all for an intelligent conversation taking place in America about how to improve our bang for the buck while maintaining a strong National Defense insupport of our nation and our allies and our interests across the world. Paul though makes an ignorant argument that would be a blow to freedom worldwide.
It is not the mission of our military to institute “freedom” worldwide. In a world full of despots we only seem to export “freedom” to countries which have something we want.
The death of neoconservatism.
Never has any philosophy been proven so wrong, so fatal, so disastrous for our country and so deadly for our troops as the views expounded by neoconservative theoreticians.
Their ascent to power meant tragedy, failure and death. Their arrogance and their imperial grandeur has alienated what Jefferson called the decent opinion of mankind. Their tactics have been pursued with contempt for alternate views, corruption of our democratic system, and condescension towards those who know far more about military affairs than they do.
In fact, one of the great specialties of the neoconservative movement is that so many who so ostentatiously failed to serve in the military, when their time came, so sneeringly question the patriotism of others, including those awarded medals for valor in combat.
When Ronald Reagan was changing the world with Mikhail Gorbachev, there were the neoconservatives, uttering their sneering contempt for Reagan, comparing his talks with Gorbachev to Pearl Harbor, comparing his diplomacy to Neville Chamberlain.
George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their fellow neoconservatives know better than Reagan about negotiating with enemies. They know better than Eisenhower about military industrial complexes. They know better than Ford about seeking diplomatic agreements to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction. They know better than Nixon about achieving breakthroughs with our major adversaries.
They are very good about hurling insults to attack their domestic enemies and very bad about supporting wounded troops, disabled veterans and homeless heroes.
Neoconservatives are very special people, in their own eyes. When things go wrong they become the party of perjury and pardons, the party of abuse of power and abuse of executive privilege to cover up their failures and crimes.
Neoconservatives champion the politics of fear, desperately seeking to frighten the people to justify their attacks on freedoms guaranteed by statute and constitution.
Neoconservatives embody the politics of profiteering, masterminding and organizing the most corrupt occupation in world history, staffed by ideological partisans, rewarding their campaign contributors, mismanaging tens of billions of lost and stolen dollars, under the imperial arrogance of a proconsul awarded the Presidential Medal Of Freedom.
Neoconservatives know better than generals, with their contempt for the Geneva Convention and their actions that civilized people call torture.
Our neoconservative theoreticians believe that George Washington was wrong and George Bush is right. Even torture is done with the big lie that they are promoting freedom and democracy with their corrupt occupation, their war against the Geneva Convention, and their shadow CIA created in the bowels of Rumsfeld’s neoconservative Department of Defense.
And then they try to keep their secrets.
And then they lie about what they do.
And then they bear false witness to Congress.
And then they claim that criminal acts are protected by privilege.
And then they complain when confronted by the law.
And then they escalate their catastrophic war over the objection of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And now they want to continue this war in perpetuity and dump this disaster on the desk of the successor, to the man who calls himself the decider.
And there they are, again, today, on the oped pages of the newspapers, in their discredited think tanks, before the smirking courtiers of the cable networks, still claiming they are right and their deadly blunders must be escalated again, and again.
Neoconservatism is dumb, discredited, and dead.
Keep spreading your hate. Your arguments are always full of contempt and falsehoods about America all based upon your boogey man the neo-con. You have been continually proven wrong in regards to our military and the war in Iraq. Your pipe dream policies have never been mainstream in America at any point including the times of the Founders but just as all radical idealists do you imagine that they were. You would be much more at home alongside CodePink and the socialists of International A.N.S.W.E.R. and of course the Ron Paul truthers instead of here at FR.
Never was taught to believe in the Easter Bunny, only in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I think that yours is the profound naivete that believes what these same political hacks do to other countries, they won't do --and aren't doing -- to ours.
Have you seen this video, (starts 10 seconds in)? According to what's been said about it (I haven't checked on the veracity of it), it was only supposed to be released to British government MPs but someone leaked it. (The company, Blackwell Briggs, is a construction/security company purported to be a global rape, pillage & plunder type)
In any case, don't be shocked when those same "Invade the World, Invite the World" neocon types sell out all our freedoms to companies like this.
AND NOW, FRIENDS AND COUNTRYMEN, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind?
Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.
She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.
She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.
She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force....
She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....
[America?s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.
John Adams
There is nothing there that I disagree with though obviously in your demented mind you think that there is. In the name of anti-war (in which you do fall under) have more of our freedom been stolen then ever under the name of self-defense. Your Code Pink mentality is the same that has lead us into quagmires such as the United Nations and that has cost the lives of our Armed Services and prolonged wars with your ‘blame America’ mentality and your treasonous defense of those enemies who openly slaughter their own people while plotting against us as well.
John Adams would spit on you.
And since you have such non-interventionist mentality let me ask you…. Would you have stood by and done nothing while millions of Jews were being tortured and murdered? Would you repeat that pattern over and over simply allowing dictators to ruthlessly genocide people in other nations by the millions?
Oh, please. That tin pot dictator didn't amount to the merest pimple on America's backside. It took a matter of days for our military to utterly route and destroy his. Threat? What threat? He was a threat to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, maybe. But to the United States? That's just silly.
Saddam Hussein was a serious threat to the United States and our allies.
It is amazing how many CodePink types there are here at FR under the guise of being Ron Paul supporters.
You heard correct. That is, it is to defend our nation, not Kuwait or Iraq or whatever. And the one thing we don't do is defend our nation. We have the biggest military in the world and we can't protect our own borders. We spend gazillions on defense and then let a bunch of Muslims overstay their visas (why did we give a Muslim a visa in the first place?) and fly planes into buildings, not to metion promote Muslims to our officer corps where they can shoot our soldiers in America at will.
Seal the border, get energy independent, arm to the teeth, and throw everybody else under the next bus just as soon as it suits us.
You internationalists are Trotskyites and you don't even know it. The Neocons are (mostly) direct political descendents from Lev Brotshein himself (via Max Shachtman and Michael Harrington). You're the ones who are unwittingly trying to graft a virulently Marxist internationalism onto this tree that George Washington planted over 200 years ago. You have naught to do with the authentic American tradition.
Ron Paul embodies that tradition. He's a Taft Republican. That's what all of us Republicans were until Bill Buckley cut a deal with the Trotskyites 20 years or so ago. The fact that a "conservative" forum could find a healthy isolationism controversial says more about the "Marxitis" that infects the modern Neocon movement than about conservatism per se.
Excellent quote. Thanks for that.
It's you Trotskyite dupes who buy nonsensical slogans like "saving the world from evil." You're engaged in a childish fantasy with yourselves cast as Mighty Mouse.
Look at the picture you posted. The idiot with the cigar was a threat to us with our thousands of nukes? His entire country would be glass before he even thought about it, if we had a real conservative in office. As it is we have Marxists, either the orthodox Demcocrat Stalinist variety, or the kinder-gentler Pubbie Trotskyite form. But you're all for spreading your ideology at the point of the sword. You're a bunch of Crusader Rabbits. I don't need foreign wars and the horrific expense imposed on me as a taxpayer. All I need is secure borders, safe streets, low taxes and fair trade. We can get all of those things if you just get out of the buisness of saving the world.
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