THE REPUBLICANS TALK BIG, BUT.......WHERE'S THE BEEF?

Wendy's famous "Where's the Beef" hamburger  ad........

 

Republicans talk about being tough with our enemies, but they have no clue for how to pay for it.

The United States has been at war 222 out of 239 Years, since 1776.  That 93% of all of our years as a nation.  In this last war in Afghanistan, it will be 15 years straight by the time it was supposed to be lowered to only military assistance and training for the Afghani government.  Now the president is saying that the numbers of US troops will not be reduced as much as was previously agreed.  That’s probably for avoiding another debacle such as what happened after the US pulled out of Iraq and the ISIL terrorists took over 1/3^rd of the country.

 OK, so we are the most powerful military nation on the globe and have since also been the only one left to take on the role as the world’s police force.

The problem with all that is that in all these years at being at war, all that expensive military equipment has been used up, worn-out or has become obsolete.  It all now needs to be updated, repaired or mostly replaced, and the current federal budgets are not up to the job.

And if you look at and listen to the potential Republican candidates for president in 2016, most have been staking out what would be called a “hawkish” position on foreign policy.  Most of the party’s leading politicians have been going after President Obama for doing way too little for fighting ISIL and for defending the Ukraine as he tries to strike what they call, “a bad nuclear deal with Iran”.

However, if you look closer, this hawkishness has been mostly pure rhetoric. With few exceptions, the Republicans have not been very clear about what they would do differently than the Obama administration. And they have not talked much about what they would do or any discussion about the possible costs of an alternative approach.

But that may all be coming to an end as it is now time to debate the federal budget.  Of course, the biggest part of every federal budget is the defense spending.

So now we are left to wonder whether this new Republican hawkish tone is based on their genuine conviction about the nature of the threats facing the world, and America?  Or will it just be the many Republican politicians figuring that hawkishness is a great way to run against the Democratic nominee in 2016?

Now, the latest very lame Republican House Budget Committee proposal last week sought to use a slight-of-hand slush-fund approach for increasing emergency military contingency funding.  However, in that budget proposal, the hard Sequester spending caps would remain in place this year and for future years. At those basic budget levels, as successive secretaries of defense and service chiefs have warned, all that worn-out, used, obsolete military equipment would seriously hinder the United States’ ability to defend its interests.  In other words, the ability to defeat ISIL and to protect American interests would be gravely in doubt.

Last year, the National Defense Panel, a bipartisan congressionally appointed commission co-chaired by former defense secretary William J. Perry and former US Central Command leader Gen. John P. Abizaid, unanimously recommended that Congress repeal the sequester.  They recommend a return, “at a minimum,” to the budget prepared by former defense secretary Robert Gates in fiscal 2012.  That budget would have brought fiscal 2016 spending to $640 billion. In recent weeks, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), the chairmen of the Senate and House armed services committees, have proposed at least trying to get closer to Gates’s levels, calling for defense spending of $577 billion in 2016.

But due to Republican hypocrisy, Republican congressional leaders are willing to have the US armed forces operate below what our top man in a military uniform calls “the bottom edge of manageable risk to our national defense.”  Republicans are very loud when denouncing President Obama for weakening the nation’s security, yet when it comes to paying for our foreign policy, all their tough rhetoric starts to fade and all of a sudden, there are seldom any GOP supporters left to be found.

Those idiots who have been beating up the president while cheering on the Republicans need to tell those same Republicans, those Fox viewers, Rushbo listeners and the right-wing talkers that the national security they demand costs taxpayer money.

As these presidential wannabees travel through Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida, they need to say over and over that a big part of their candidacy, and a central goal of their presidency, would be breaking the current Sequester and increasing spending on defense.

Whether they like it or not, real leadership sometimes means telling people what they don’t want to hear.  Both Republicans and Democrats running for office need to show what kind of political courage they have, today, when the critical budget decisions are being made.

Anyone that says they can do all this on the cheap is dealing with some dangerous issues that could cost the lives of many innocent Americans, both civilian and military.

That is no way to run the most powerful nation on the globe.

Copyright G.Ater  2015