Posted on 12/18/2007 7:07:13 PM PST by Tlaloc
For all of the understandable attention to the Bush-bashing rhetoric in former governor Mike Huckabee's new foreign policy manifesto, what is interesting about the document is that in many ways, the president would agree with a lot in it. If anything, in some key areas, Huckabee is not promising to repudiate Bush so much as to out-Bush the president.
Just as Bush has vowed to move the country toward energy independence, so does Huckabee. The difference is that Huckabee says he can do it in 10 years. While the president fights for tens of billions of additional military spending, Huckabee promises to go him one better by devoting hundreds of billions of dollars more to the Pentagon. And Huckabee agrees with the Bush plan to expand the size of the Army and Marine Corps over the next five years; he just says he could get it done in half the time. ...while criticizing the president for his "arrogant bunker mentality," Huckabee promises to out-Bush Bush in the military arena. He notes that the United States now spends about 3.9 percent of its gross domestic product on defense compared with 6 percent in 1986. "We need to return to that six percent level," he writes. First of all, using percentage of GDP as a measurement tells only part of the story. While the Pentagon budget is a smaller proportion of the overall economy today, that is largely because the overall economy has grown so much; measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, the $459 billion Pentagon budget today is actually almost as big as it was in the Cold War under Ronald Reagan not even counting the additional $196 billion Bush wants this year for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.washingtonpost.com ...
Traiter
“Just as Bush has vowed to move the country toward energy independence, so does Huckabee.”
Energy independence in 10 years? That’s absolutely not going to happen. No way. Does anyone actually believe Huckabee can deliver on this promise or the one on the Fair Tax? Not gonna happen folks.
Be not extravagantly high in expression of thy
commendations of men thou likest, it may make
the hearer’s stomach rise.
Thomas Fuller (1608 - 1661)
Never4 forget the 11th commandment of not attacking a fellow Republican. Huckabee is a great candidate and deserves our support if he wins the nomination.
Until then, we get to drag all the skeletons out of his closet and he gets to prevaricate his way around the minefield, if he can.
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