If a picture paints a thousand words, I want Lindsey Graham to respond to this:
And while we're at it, how 'bout this one too:
And then maybe he can explain how an item that comprises more than half of the nation's discretionary spending and is more than the next fourteen countries combined could possibly be considered "gutted."
"What if the leader of North Korea woke up tomorrow and said 'it's time to take the South?' 440,000 members of the U.S. Army is a gutted Army," Graham said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday morning. "This budget by President Obama guts our defense. It is the smallest Army since 1940, the smallest Navy since 1950, the smallest Air Force in modern history."
Graham, a leading defense hawk who's facing a potentially competitive primary, has been especially critical of nearly every suggestion the Obama administration has made in regards to foreign policy and defense.
If you read between the lines of that final paragraph, you'll see the reason why: Graham just needs to criticize Obama for his own political survival. It didn't matter what Obama did or didn't do. Whatever the circumstance, Graham would have had to criticize him. But national security is not what Huckleberry is worried about.
Reduction in the Military budget does not threaten our national security. Even if defense spending were reduced by half, the US would easily remain the world’s strongest military superpower. The figure below shows how the US military spending compares to the rest of the world. The US spends almost 5 times more than China on the military, 10 times more than Russia, and 95 times more than Iran!
And do not expect the DoD to be careful with that money. In 2001 the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that the DoD cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions, supposedly because of the complexity and the multitude of accounting systems which do not conform with each other. Read Rumsfeld’s entire speech.
The DoD continues on the goose chase after the loose money preparing for its first audit by 2017 amidst the Government Accountability Office’s sobering assessment of the department’s accounting issues.
The defense contracting systems is ripe with fraud and abuse and according to a DoD report hundreds of defense contractors that defrauded the U.S. military received more than $1.1 trillion in Pentagon contracts during the past decade.
We have citizens in this wealthiest nation in the world dying from poverty, and more who will die due to the growing inequality. We have a crumbling infrastructure ill-prepared to meet the more extreme weather events that our inability to deal with climate change has wrought. We have a generation who will suffer from drowning debt because of the rising cost of education. We have a generation of baby boomers aging into senior citizens and their comensurate increased costs in healthcare and aid. There are clear and pressing needs for that money right here in this country. So rather than reflexively demanding more and more money that will simply be pocketed by defense contractors under more and more fraudulent conditions, how about if Graham demands more responsible defense spending?
Yeah, like that will ever happen.
