Hypocrisy is far too common a feature of our political culture to comprehensively chronicle, particularly when there is a change of party control and each side starts doing exactly that to which they spent the last several years vociferously objecting; see here for a vivid example of that dynamic, from a new Pew poll released today:
So you thought the Pentagon was already big enough? Well, what do you know, especially with the price of the American military slated to grow by at least 25% over the next decade?
Forget about the butter. It's bad for you anyway. And sheer military power, as well as the money behind it, assures the country of a thick waistline without the cholesterol. So, let's sing the praises of perpetual war. We better, since right now every forecast in sight tells us that it's our future.
Is there a difference between covert propaganda and secretive campaigns to shape public opinion on controversial issues? The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) apparently thinks that there is.
As the single largest consumer of energy in the world, the U.S. military is poised at the center of two of the most life-altering issues of our time: climate change and the height of oil production (“peak oil”). Surprisingly, the Pentagon began taking both matters seriously much sooner than the rest of government, which still has its fair share of skeptics.
In a highly unusual reversal, the Defense Department's inspector general's office has withdrawn a report it issued in January exonerating a Pentagon public relations program that made extensive use of retired officers who worked as military analysts for television and radio networks.
In the comic books, bad guys often team up to fight the forces of good.
The Masters of Evil battle the Avengers superhero team. The Joker and
Scarecrow ally against Batman. Lex Luthor and Brainiac take on
Superman.
And the Somali pirates, who have dominated recent headlines with
their hijacking and hostage-taking, join hands with al-Qaeda to form a
dynamic evil duo against the United States and our allies. We're the
friendly monsters -- a big, hulking superpower with a heart of gold --
and they're the aliens from Planet Amok.
I've always wondered: What was the guy who invented bagpipes really trying to make?
Well, at least that wheezing, whining invention turned out to be
merely irritating, not actually dangerous. Leave it to the Dr.
Strangelovian schemers at the Pentagon, however, to come up with an
invention that is both irritating and truly dangerous, as well as being
a galloping rip-off of us taxpayers.
Much of the media attention this week on President Obama's new
military budget has put forward a false narrative wherein Obama is
somehow taking his socialist/pacifist sledgehammer to the Pentagon's
war machine and blasting it to smithereens. Republicans have charged
that Obama is endangering the country's security, while the Democratic
leadership has hailed it as the dawn of a new era in responsible
spending priorities. Part of this narrative portrays Defense Secretary
Robert Gates as standing up to the war industry, particularly military
contractors.
WASHINGTON - Secretary of Defense Robert Gates unveiled the U.S.'s much-anticipated new military budget Monday, which aims to reorient the armed forces toward irregular and counterinsurgency warfare while proposing cuts in several major weapons programs.
The budget is viewed as a major step in the ongoing debate within the U.S. military about whether to focus primarily on conventional warfare against other states or on counterinsurgency operations against non-state actors.
WASHINGTON - Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will announce "a fundamental shift" in the military's weapons budget on Monday, unveiling a series of cuts to big-ticket programs that he deems ill-suited to meeting current national security threats, the Pentagon said yesterday.
"These are not changes to the margins. This is a fundamental shift," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters yesterday, though he declined to provide specifics of the plan, which Gates will unveil after briefing key members of Congress over the weekend.
