Interesting article. I do believe that TARP was only $700 billion, however.
Heya Tolerance...
Nobody ridicules national security more than those who take it completely for granted.
Republican presidential contenders for 2016 should embrace that campaign theme to demolish the ultra-hawkish Hillary Clinton and her Napoleonic complex. …Huh??
Her Thighness is only a weathervane. She will charge mindlessly in whichever direction seems most politically advantageous. Calling her “ultra hawkish” is meaningless; she will try to play whatever role benefits her most. Thankfully, she is a buffoon compared with Bubba.
“Rand Paul Knocks Out Marco Rubio Like Ali Over Foreman”
Bruce Fein and other conservatives see the horrors that the neocons brought the GOP and the world. I’m sure he’ll be denounced as a “libtard” on this thread.
What the U.S. stepped into after WWII was a strange and fragmented current of the remnants of empires predating the country itself: the French in Indochina, for example, the German and Belgian in Africa, a rather longer-standing commitment in the Philippines snatched from the Spanish and unfortunately mixed with a river of Filipino blood afterward, a similar one in Cuba that we simply let go to some unintended consequences. That latter should warn us against the implications of Fein's policy recommendations:
There would be nothing risky, however, in ending the permanent warfare state. It would return the United States to the foreign policy of President George Washington expounded in his Farewell Address and followed until the post-World War II birth of the American Empire.
Ugh. Neo-isolationism is profoundly anti-historical and Fein should know better than this. For one thing, what Washington was facing was not a tabula rasa but at least seven (and arguably more) "entangling foreign commitments" on the day he took office, some of which were exceedingly awkward, especially for France. You can't return to something that didn't exist. Nor did the country follow any such policy much after Jefferson decided to take on the Barbary pirates.
More to the point, the notion that ending this "warfare state" is riskless is laughable. It is this, in Fein's own words:
In the history of the world, no nation has ever been safer from foreign aggression than the United States.
True - at least for the moment, although the citizens of the British Empires might have made a similar claim at their heights, and the French under Napoleon and Louis XIV before him, and a host of others. It's a very temporary condition and it depends on what place you occupy on the broad arc of empire. But this did not simply flash into existence. To a very great degree this is the result of policies that have other untoward costs, notably money and blood, the discarding of which might save us the latter but at the cost of that safety. One discards the safety of empire when one discards the empire. The tiger is easy to mount but dismounting takes a bit of planning and not a little risk.
I think that it can be accomplished and pray that it will. But it will take a commitment of resources that is well beyond that of a single administration. Getting into this state began with Kennan's Long Telegram, and the people committing to it did so understanding that it was long-term and inevitably costly; it was, on the other hand, the best alternative available at the time. It was also remarkably successful.
We can dismount this tiger, I think, but not in a single election, which is my real complaint about Fein's case here: this is grand strategy, a program of decades, and it will not be resolved in the matter of a single election. No American election has ever hinged on grand strategy. It cannot be a centerpiece of any political campaign lest it be identified with a single party and discarded when that party is out of office. We can't have that. The mess the 0bama administration has made of U.S. foreign policy is what results when that happens.
Now that's a crazy statement to make. We're not safe from aggression. We're being invaded and instead of protecting the US our military is being used to wreak havoc all over the world.
We've become the military for the global elite as they usurp all wealth and power across the globe.
Fein is right - for one thing, we do not have the money to police the world and to protect out own shores by projecting power everywhere on the planet.
The federal government is broke. As Mark Steyn points out, if it paid back $18T, it would still be at zero - broke! It maintains the regulatory and warfare state by printing money, manipulating numbers, and borrowing from countries it cannot possibly ever pay back.
I suppose if they want to forgo defense industry campaign money, sure.
IF going bankrupt, supporting a civil welfare state, is a catastrophe, then will that bankruptcy be acceptable supporting the military industrial welfare state?
Hey, Bruce! I don’t understand. The Great Pretender in the Oval Office has steadily reduced our military strength and budget and yet he keeps raising the debt astronomically and the threat against us from the war we are in (having been attacked here at home) keeps growing, with other side steadily gaining ground within our own institutions and those of our allies as well as increasing its territory in the Middle East and North Africa. Peace and a cessation of debt should be right around the corner, in our time, as someone once said. How come its not? Is it possible you could be wrong? Just asking.
To me, any conservative candidate’s message should be GET THE GOVERNMENT OFF YOUR BACK. Liberals are destroying the middle class. There is NO facet of our lives they don’t want to control. Appeal to people’s sense of individuality and need for freedom. And don’t back down!
And this imbecile does not see the connection between point A and point B. Amazing. Like the liberal who laments that we have more people in prison than ever even while the crime rate is down. Duh. The projection of power keeps us safe. Locking up bad guys keeps them from committing crimes. Hard to figure out I guess.