Congressional Battlelines Being Drawn For A Classic Guns vs Butter Debate

Pentagon aces in the hole: Issa & McKeon

The U.S. spends nearly as much on its military-- a fifth of the entire federal budget-- as the rest of the world combined, but hasn't been especially effective militarily since World War II. The $553 billion annual Pentagon budget doesn't even include the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a convenient bookkeeping sleight of hand. And that's only one of several ugly one-eyed aunts in the attic of the debate over how the national wealth is allocated, especially in light of a demand by the ruling elites for an acceleration of the concentration of wealth in their own hands.

With the Democratic Party nearly as completely in the thrall of Big Business as the GOP, it's a rare legislator indeed who will tackle the Pentagon budget. Enter stage left: Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who, coincidentally, Ohio Republicans are threatening to gerrymander out of a congressional seat. He says if Congress wants to get serious about cutting spending, the Pentagon is the obvious place to start, even if just in terms of "waste and unnecessary spending."

"With the United States approaching a debt limit, with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan dragging on with a cost projected amounting to trillions of dollars, what better place for us to start to end unnecessary spending than to end these wars and to look at the larger question of the Pentagon budget," he said.

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates surprised lawmakers by calling for $78 billion in cuts to the defense budget that would include the first reductions in the size of the military since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. He singled out the Pentagon's role in driving up the budget, saying he hoped "what had been a culture of endless money" could be transformed into one of "savings and restraint."

Kucinich said Gates's cuts would be a step in the right direction, but far from sufficient.
"It's not substantial," he said. "It's a fraction of the overall Pentagon spending that would be projected to occur in that time.

"It's a constitutional responsibility to provide for the common defense. However, there's nothing in the Constitution that says that we are to blow money in that provision," he added.

But that isn't how Republicans see it. For conservatives-- to be fair, conservatives in both parties-- Pentagon spending has always been a fount for graft and corruption that has helped finance the party and the electoral ambitions of countless sleazy right-wingers, from Duke Cunningham, currently serving a term in federal prison for taking bribes from military contractors, to Jerry Lewis, who did much worse but received several get-out-of-jail-free cards from Karl Rove. Another southern California crony of Cunningham's and Lewis' is ambitious right-wing ideologue Darrell Issa, who went from stealing military vehicles to sell to chop shops and referring to 9/11 as simply a plane crash to dodging subpoenas in Cunningham's bribery case.



Issa, chair of the House Oversight committee, is now investigating everything-- except military spending and fraud.

On CBS' Face the Nation, Issa pledged to identify as much as $200 billion in wasteful spending at the federal level, and an early target list for Congress' top watchdog includes WikiLeaks, housing giant Fannie Mae, and Food and Drug Administration recalls. However, a top Democrat on the oversight committee, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio.), is calling out Issa on a glaring omission in the chairman's attack plan: the US's bloated defense budget.

In a letter sent Tuesday, Kucinich challenged Issa on why he hadn't pledged to rid the Department of Defense's $663 billion budget of wasteful spending. Kucinich cited a 2001 Government Accountability Office report, mentioned by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that found US officials had lost track of $2.3 trillion of DOD spending. Kucinich goes on:

"We have seen dozens of reports of corruption, lost money, and unaccountable transactions in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have seen report of billions of taxpayers dollars in shrink-wrapped packages sent to Iraq for unsupervised distribution. We have seen millions of dollars flow into Afghanistan, and we have seen millions of dollars flow out again into the hands of the family of President Hamid Karzai for purposes such as building luxury villas in Dubai."  

He concludes, "To meet your stated purpose of protecting American taxpayers from waste, fraud, and abuse, it is essential that you examine the Department of Defense and money wasted during unnecessary wars."

Issa isn't the only high ranking Republican eager to cut Medicare and Social Security but unwilling to get real about military spending. The new chair of the House Armed Services Committee is another thoroughly corrupt southern California Republican shill for defense contractors, Buck McKeon. "I will not stand idly by and watch the White House gut defense when Americans are deployed in harm's way," he croaked out when asked about cuts to the Pentagon budget. McKeon, in short, is a dangerous crackpot in charge of a big piece of military policy.

He doesn't have any military experience -- he spent the Vietnam era on a Mormon missionary retreat and a twenty-nine year quest (1956-1985) for a BA from Brigham Young-- but he did bankrupt his family's western wear company, so he knows how to order shirts no one wants.

You can see why he's the perfect man to oversee America's trillion-dollar defense budget.

Granted, he's a coward, a hypocrite and an incompetent. What's important is that Howard "Buck" McKeon has a vision. He knows why we're spending all that money, and why we're in Afghanistan and Iraq. (And by "we" I mean, "people other than Howard "Buck" McKeon.")

We're in Afghanistan and Iraq because of a Mormon Holy War that started in 1775.

We're in Afghanistan and Iraq to fulfill Mormon prophecy, to protect the home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Later-Day Saints, and to guarantee its freedom to send missionaries around the world... McKeon:

Afghanistan was where the planning, the kick-off of the attack on us on 9/11 took place. That's why we're there. To prevent that from happening again. It's better that we fight there, than on the streets of New York, or downtown Valencia. I just pray that we always will be able to hold those freedoms. Elder Ballard, a few years ago, visiting with the members of the Church in Washington in the Congress, said that it's important that we always keep this land free, because it's the cradle of the Church. It's where from here we send our missionaries around the world. We need to have freedom to do that. It's my prayer that we might always retain that freedom, and I wish we could do it without continued loss of treasure and blood, but it seems that that's the world we live in.