"It feels like just the latest echo in a prolonged, very successful re-marketing effort. In 2008, disdain for the “War on Terror” propelled Barack Obama past Hillary Clinton, and failures
in Afghanistan and other factors after Obama’s election soon led to the ultimate Beltway horror, i.e. proposed budget cuts. A Reuters story from
early 2011 details the misery gripping the Pentagon after Obama suggested cutting $78 billion:
The proposed cuts, unveiled at a somber Pentagon briefing on Thursday, follow increased White House and congressional scrutiny of military spending, which has doubled in real terms since
the September 11, 2001, attacks."
The embedded Reuters link goes to this, with quotes from it below:
"Other Republicans offered a swift rebuke of the plans, in a sign that the proposed cuts may not be realized despite growing pressure to rein in U.S. government spending.
“I’m not happy,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard McKeon told reporters. “This is a dramatic shift for a nation at war and a dangerous signal from the Commander in Chief.”
"McKeon and other critics took issue with Gates’ plans to cut up to 47,000 troops from the Army and Marines starting in 2015, which would represent the first cuts for those services since before the September 11 attacks.
"Analysts said the announcement was politically dicey for President Barack Obama, with U.S. troops still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Earlier on Thursday, the Pentagon announced a new deployment of more Marines to Afghanistan.“The land force end-strength
cuts are just shocking,” said Thomas Donnelly, at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank."
“Gates has announced the continued dismantling of the greatest military the world has ever known,” said J. Randy Forbes, a Republican lawmaker."
That latter point, duplicitous as it was that the “greatest military the world has ever known” was “dismantled," was “remedied” by this guy, to the exuberant cheering of the Conservatives at CPAC in 2017, and ever since (begin at 1:20 to avoid
some of the B.S.):
And this point in the Taibbi article is valid: "In the Obama years, think-tankers, pundits, and other actors began to push inverted, left-friendly versions of Bush’s rejected military utopianism, this time focusing on using force to achieve social
justice aims abroad. It worked, brilliantly."
What the Taibbi article neglects to say, and not to defend Biden in any way, is that "Biden’s one-year arms increase,” was added to by “bi-partisan hawks,” whose ideological genealogy I won’t trace again,
but have made it abundantly clear. Referring to the arms increase by attributing it to the President in office without any deeper analysis has the duplicitous effect of “indirect” or “oblique” Psychological Warfare, or as it is currently called, Cognitive
Warfare. This can be seen as well in the routine denunciations of Woodrow Wilson (fully deserved) with the omission of pointing out how it was the Republican's, particularly under Teddy Roosevelt’s influence, and Southern Democrats, who later migrated to
the Republicans as the party more willing to uphold segregation, and militarism as US policy. Made fully clear in a
who continuously applied the political pressure to get the US into WW I. At the very beginning and thereafter until Wilson did. The fallaciousness of all the discussions of war in the US is the omission of
“Causation,” and a sufficiently long “time horizon,” such that we only see the immediacy of an “event,” a perverse form of Presentism when put to work to deceive people.
What I have found in virtually every case showing Republicans voting against any military spending increase is that their “motive” was more often because it “wasn’t enough.” Lazy and/or right-wing partisan
minds don’t want to acknowledge that when micro-targeting an ostensible “non-interventionist conservatism.” But any sound rhetorical analysis will bear that out.
House passes $839B defense bill, swatting down Biden’s military plans
The House-passed National Defense Authorization Act is $37 billion above the president's request.
BLUF: "Republicans and a sizable number of Democrats saw Biden’s request — already a $30 billion increase from the current year
— as not enough to keep up with runaway inflation and match challenges posed by China and Russia.
"The final Pentagon topline will have to be hammered out by House and Senate leaders in a compromise defense bill. And lawmakers must also pass a spending bill that makes the increase a reality."
And the Senate has already indicate they’re going to raise Biden’s “meagre" so-called “Defense” budget even what the House does, with a predictable “reconciliation of” the two rival bills most likely increasing beyond the Senate Bill as it stands,
as more “crises,” inherent to US foreign policy as other nations react to our provocations, and ever-growing “Military Preparedness,” meaning the same as what T.R. meant: Preparedness for US Military Aggression:
"The 62nd annual NDAA supports a total of $857.46 billion in fiscal year 2023 funding for national defense.” What these numbers actually mean varies due to how they count spending and what dollar
numbers they include in any given press release, except they all mean more military spending, more “War Preparedness” as Teddy Roosevelt always pushed for, and more wars, as Teddy Roosevelt always pushed for. Whom I mention because some otherwise intelligent
tcommentati
But as the 2024 Presidential election campaign has already begun, so has “micro-targeting” by partisan campaigns, like the Arthur Finkelstein/Trump “Six-Party Theory” campaign of 2017, with its micro-targeting campaign aimed at gullible “non-interventionist
conservatives’ of the “Right” is to create the political myth that Republicans and particularly the Trumpites are for “Restraint and Realism” which their relentless advocacy of ever larger military budgets (along with the right-wing Democrats they're united
with ideologically and with a collective “Weltanschauung”) belies. Even while Trump was broadcasting he was building a military for the "Offensive,” as he explained here (repeating this): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSE0sNXwHuI
While I’m not campaigning “for” anyone, I believe its necessary to rebut the lies told to people and on other forums I criticize the Democrats and Biden more. But some people here have made it clear that they’re fully on board with Trumpism, AEI,
Heritage, NatCons, et al., while creating a “political myth” as a not so subliminal “political cognitive campaign,” with suggestiveness that the same above aren’t for war, anymore. With an additional reason that they need to be called on that as it adds to
the “legitimacy” of Democratic Party “Warfighting,” to include both being out of the same “tradition” of that Movement formed by CIA operatives in the 1950s.
But to the GOP, this describes them pretty well, though there is no “battle:"
BLUF: "Donald Trump’s political achievement in 2016 was to sense the possibility for a new GOP coalition unseen since before World War II. He did this not by reiterating libertarian foreign-policy preferences. Rather, he combined non-interventionist criticism
of “endless wars” with hardline stands on China, jihadist terrorism, anti-American dictatorships in Latin America, and US defense spending. He further bundled this combination, crucially, with a ferociously anti-establishment personality, a protectionist position
on trade, and a more restrictive stance on immigration. As it turned out, this combination was enough to tilt upside down earlier assumptions about what was possible with regard to Republican foreign policy. Or to put it another way, he brought together non-interventionists
and hardliners against the activist GOP policy that dominated the party, at the presidential level, after 1940. Establishment Republicans viewed this as revolutionary for good reason—because it was.”
And hopefully the right-wing's “Cancel Culture” won’t come down on me for criticizing “Conservatives” and Republicans here. But someone needs to represent the late Bill Polk’s and Norman Birnbaum’s views, which I think I do, and was told so by them before they
passed.
And no need for “what-aboutism” here. "I’ve addressed the Democrat’s militarists as well.though historically, they fall under those named in the sentence above in military-ideological terms, even if not sharing the same economics outlook.
Fifteen years ago, as the Bush years waned and political division began skyrocketing, one thing everyone agreed on was that “earmarks” were bad. A trifecta of scandals involving prison-bound
congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham,
Republican super-lobbyist (and future Kevin Spacey role) Jack Abramoff,
and a $320 million “bridge to nowhere”
exposed an intricate system of legalized payoffs both parties scrambled to oppose.
In return, the contractor showered the congressman with gifts — helping him finance a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, a condo overlooking the nation’s capital, exclusive use of a yacht on
the Potomac, antiques, private-jet travel and prostitutes.
Fast forward to last week. As
January 6th hearings, a presidential
fist-bump, and a
Kardashian spawn’s gender reveal
gobbled attention, the House quietly passed a monster $839 billion defense package. It was “the definition
of a bipartisan bill,” chirped Alabama’s Mike Rogers, as 180 Democrats and 149 Republicans joined to smash by tens of billions previous records for military spending. With this already underreported story, just one
news outlet, Roll Call, described a “first
of its kind” report published by the Department of Defense Comptroller’s office, which revealed at least $58 billion of “congressional additions” above Joe Biden’s budget request.
As former Senate aide and defense budget analyst Winslow Wheeler puts it, these “additions” are “not (all) earmarks under either the House’s or Senate’s shriveled definition of them,
but they are all earmarks… under the classic understanding.” What’s in those requests? As
Roll Call’s Donnelly explains, the $58 billion included “money to respond to disasters and the war in Ukraine,” but also:
Billions of dollars in weapons the military did not seek, such as more than $4 billion worth of unrequested warships, many of them built by the constituents of senior appropriators.
This felt like Duke Cunningham days, back with a vengeance. The $58 billion revealed by the Department of Defense only pertained to “congressional increases” larger than $20 million.
I asked the DoD to ask if they also counted smaller appropriations. So far, they’ve declined to comment, but according to several sources (and
Roll Call), the actual amount of “additions” is almost surely far higher than $58 billion.
Duke
Cunningham’s bribe menu. Note the price change at $20 million
Both the triumphant return of the earmark and the enormous defense hike should have been big stories. To put $58 billion (at least) in defense “increases” in context, the amount of
overall federal earmarks in 2006, the infamous year that prompted so much outrage, was said to be $26 billion. Meanwhile Biden’s one-year arms increase exceeds the pace
of Donald Trump’s infamous $200 billion collective defense hike between 2017-2019. These are major surges past the levels of both pork and weapons spending that had progressives roaring for “change,” yet there’s almost zero outcry now. Why?
It feels like just the latest echo in a prolonged, very successful re-marketing effort. In 2008, disdain for the “War on Terror” propelled Barack Obama past Hillary Clinton, and failures
in Afghanistan and other factors after Obama’s election soon led to the ultimate Beltway horror, i.e. proposed budget cuts. A
Reuters story from
early 2011 details the misery gripping the Pentagon after Obama suggested cutting $78 billion:
The proposed cuts, unveiled at a somber Pentagon briefing on Thursday, follow increased White House and congressional scrutiny of military spending, which has doubled in real terms since
the September 11, 2001, attacks.
From that point, however, the U.S. embarked upon what geopolitical analyst Christopher Mott calls the “millennial rebrand of the neoconservative project,” and the Pentagon’s fortunes rose anew. In the Obama years, think-tankers,
pundits, and other actors began to push inverted, left-friendly versions of Bush’s rejected military utopianism, this time focusing on using force to achieve social justice aims abroad. It worked, brilliantly.
