Category Archives: Military

The Price Of ‘Certainty’

Debt, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Government, Military, Republicans

Sec. 401. of the ‘‘Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013’’ (on page 2 of 77 pages) stipulates the obvious “Increase in contributions to Federal Employees’ Retirement System for new employees.” Well of course.

Conversely, Sec. 403. of the same impenetrable document stipulates an “Annual adjustment of retired pay and retainer pay amounts for retired members of the Armed Forces under age 62.” Judging by the apoplexy among members of the military, the verbiage means cuts to the warfare arm of the welfare-warfare state.

New York Time:

Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, all Republicans, will bring military families to the Senate on Tuesday to protest the cuts. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, complained of “a real hit to military retirements,” and said the measure did not do enough to reduce the deficit.

Those gullible enough to serve Uncle Sam without questioning whether going abroad in search of monsters to slay is indeed tantamount to defending “American Freedoms”—should wisen up. Of course your pay will be cut first. To your masters, your life is also forfeit.

And:

Under the budget deal, spending on defense and nondefense programs would rise from the $967 billion slated for this fiscal year to $1.012 trillion, mitigating the impact of across-the-board spending cuts and allowing congressional lawmakers to draft detailed spending plans for the first time in several years. Spending in fiscal 2015, which begins Oct. 1, would rise from $995 billion to $1.014 trillion. Though total spending would rise $63 billion over 10 years, the measure would trim the deficit slightly.

Here’s Judge Andrew Napolitano’s take on the agreement struck between Rep. Paul Ryan and Senate Budget Committee chair, Democrat Patty Murray (here they are on Meet the Presstitutes):

The speaker has demonstrated a poverty of leadership,” Napolitano said. “He did get 332 votes because he got the Democrats to vote with him and he lost the Republicans who retain the value of small government. This doesn’t decrease the deficit, it adds to it. It doesn’t decrease the debt, it adds to it.”
“This is an absolute fraud. They’re afraid of reality. They have no sense, the Republican establishment,” he continued. “They have no sense of small government values that they were elected to put into law.”
“Wow, tell us how you feel,” co-panelist Juan Williams joked.
“There is no distinction between John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi on this,” the judge asserted.

Mitch (McConnell), Mark (Levin), And The Military Industrial Complex

Military, Republicans, The State, Welfare

In an effort to further marginalize those “Republican challengers further to the … right who have few qualms about trimming military budgets,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been rattling the defense industry with threats that “spending cuts” favored by tea party-aligned Republicans will come at the expense of “robust national-security spending.”

We can only hope so.

Writes Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Gerard Baker:

What he’s really saying is that he’s a big spending Republican [IM: is there any other kind?] who will take care of these special interests if they help him in the primary …’It’s, you scratch my back, I will scratch your back.’

What I don’t get is this: This story I got from an exercised Mark Levin. The broadcaster, an unwavering champion of the warfare state and the welfariate that mans it, was irate. Why? Isn’t Mitch, on this front, more aligned with Mark than “tea party-aligned candidates,” some of whom wish to cut military spending?

Overall, Tom Cruise Is Better Than A Soldier

Celebrity, Hollywood, Military, Psychiatry, War

There, I’ve said It: Tom Cruise is selling himself short by jokingly comparing his action-hero movie stunts to being “deployed overseas in Afghanistan.” The moron media is hyperventilating over Cruise’s alleged sacrilegious comment.

I’ve been meaning to come to the defense of the iconoclastic, embattled actor yet again.

Fact: Tom Cruise has created real value for all those hundreds of millions of film fans who’ve consumed his products over the decades. He makes movies people enjoy and want to see. He’s an industry unto himself.

Cruise makes peace, not war. He generates wealth; he doesn’t consume the wealth of taxpayers. He creates a product, rather than wreck property not his.

Enough aid.

American masses and media can’t stand a non-conformist. The actor’s heroic stand against the “psychiatric peanut gallery” drew vitriol, but failed to dampen America’s enthusiasm for Cruise’s product.

Cruise, you should know, is a principled devotee of the late (great) anti-psychiatry thinker, Thomas S. Szasz.

Military Deaths, Not Death Benefits, Are The Real Scandal

Family, Foreign Policy, Military, War

Watch this ceremony at the Dover Air Force Base. Soldiers receive the coffined body of a slain comrade on its arrival in Dover. They handle it with exquisite care, hands clad in white gloves. What a stark, pathos-filled, sad ceremony, every move so tender and respectful.

CNN has shown this dark side of the wars all mainstream media laud because the “survivor benefits to the families, which include a $100,000 payment made within days of the death,” were suspended, the president having refused to use his power to prioritize in the allocation of revenues.

The real scandal is not the death-benefit short-term lapse, but that American men and women are still dying (and killing) in these dumps for no good reason. What a wanton waste of promise-filled young lives.

A webcam ought to be installed permanently at Dover—a debt clock of sorts—to remind Americans of this G-d-awful grief and waste.