Rachel Maddow and Barney Frank have a brilliant discussion of the politics of defense spending -- notice anything else while they're talking?

On last night's Rachel Maddow Show, frequent guest Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, talked about the politics and economics of the Senate's overwhelming rejection of funding for the useless F-22.


"Something happened today in Washington that defies the common wisdom of 50 years of American politics. . . . D.C. common wisdom might never recover."

-- Rachel Maddow, on last night's show

"Henry Knox, the first secretary of war, was charged with building the first American fleet, and to get the support of Congress Knox eventually wound up with six frigates being built in six different shipyards in six different states."

-- Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a speech excerpted on the show

"We've been having this debate on whether or not we need a second stimulus, and people have missed the point. My conservative colleagues have a second stimulus. It's the F-22. They don't even pretend that it has a military mission. "

-- Rep. Barney Frank, talking to Rachel on the show

by Ken

This is a brilliant segment, on an issue that has been central to American politics and economics throughout modern history, but is almost never discussed publicly in the rarefied precincts inside the Beltway.

As Defense Secretary Gates points out in the clip, the politicization of defense spending is literally as old as the American republic. (In case you've forgotten, Henry Knox wasn't just President George Washington's secretary of war, in what we might call the Second American Republic, under the U.S. Constitution. He had already been serving in that position since 1785, having been appointed by the Continental Congress, in our "First Republic," the government under the Articles of Confederation.) On the Right in particular, military spending has achieved the status of virtual untouchability, regardless of whether expenditures contribute to national security in any way, as Rachel pointedly shows that the F-22 doesn't. Amercan pols almost universally believe -- and unfortunately there is all too much evidence to back them up -- that there is no winning answer to accusations of being "soft on defense."

Rachel traces the peculiar untouchability of defense spending, no matter how useless or wasteful, through the famous January 1961 parting warning by President Eisenhower (who of course had been a five-star Army general and the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe in World War II, not to mention his just-completed eight-year stint as commander-in-chief of U.S. armed forces during the height of the Cold War) against the power of the "military-industrial complex." Rachel plays that clip too, and points out that Lockheed-Martin, when it conceived the F-22 project, picked up where Secretary Knox left off when he spread those six frigates around six states in the 1780s, planning to have parts built in 40 different states for maximal political exposure.

Congressman Frank, while noting that the fight still has to be won in the House (in saluting the president for taking his unflinching stand on the F-22, he points out that a couple of weeks ago, when the House Armed Services Committee rammed continued funding through the House, "I tried to offer an amendment on the floor, and I couldn't even get the Democratic leadership to allow me to offer the amendment"), says of yesterday's unexpectedly decisive Senate response to the president's pleading on the F-22, "If we had lost this fight, our ability to begin to curtail the military budget would be over."

(Parenthetical note: I guess that's why all the pundits are talking today about this enormous boost in the president's power ratings. Kidding!)

Large quantities of military waste can be eliminated, the congressman stresses, "without endangering one iota the security of the United States."

"We're being told that we can't afford to do health care, that we can't afford to do housing, etcetera. The military budget is the main reason we can't afford it. If we had not fought that foolish and destructive war in Iraq, we would have had the money to pay for the health care. That whole debate wouldn't happen. Going forward, if we don't being to curtail military-spending excesses, then we will be in that bind."

As usual, Barney Frank being Barney Frank, he comes up with a wonderful Barneyism. He points out that his conservative colleagues are always adamant in their insistence that government spending doesn't create jobs -- except, that is, when it comes to arms. "Armed Keynesianism," he calls this.

I don't think it's a great surprise that this segment is as fine as it is. Nobody is better than Rachel and her staff at putting together an overview of a pressing issue, and there's no pol more committed -- or smarter-- than our Barney.

As it happens, I didn't see last night's show, and so didn't see this segment until I caught up with it via the clip. And the reason I watched it was in part because of an observation by our friend Lane Hudson, the onetime congressional staffer who is now well-known as a progressive activist. Lane points out that when Rachel Maddow interviews Barney Frank, everybody involved in the conversation is gay.

And with luck, it doesn't even occur to us that this is something out of the ordinary. Oh, I imagine the usual Kristian Kooks are having their usual hissy fits wherever they gather to screech and whine. It is, I would venture, a glimpse of the Grail: two extraordinarily gifted people doing exactly the jobs they were meant to do, and oh yes, they happen to be gay.

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