The future base of the GOP

The Ponzi Scheme is what some people call Medicare/Medicaid.
Did we train or fund the 9/11 terrorists? I must've missed that one. Did we train the madrassah mullahs? Or the Soviets? Or Hitler? Or did we (and the rest of Western Europe) just sit back and let bad guys get away with (literally) murder?

 

OK, I'll be brief...

I responded with what I thought was an appropriately ridiculous retort to your ridiculous strawman post. I thought that that was clear when I said "if you put it that way."

When you asked what I thought was a legitimate question, I responded with historical examples of people like you saying "forget using a military. Let's just hope bad guys don't do the bad things it looks like they're going to do." And when you asked about us training our enemies, I gave what I thought were pretty well-known examples of countries and/or dictators doing bad things to us and other innocent people, none of whom had our training or backing.

Clearer now?

 

you really need to read more--better yet, to understand what you're reading. This is the Prime Minister of Libya, a place where we didn't send a single troop onto the ground. In fact, almost all of the support was NATO-based. And those troops came home a long time ago (I was one).

Hardly the M.O. of Al-Qaeda, though maybe those bastards are getting sneaky with their recruitment practices.

Unless you're saying that it's our responsibility to ensure that countries police their own borders to ensure Al-Qaeda can't enter or operate there?

 

You can't be more off. And I write back because there are very few people on here (including yourself) who have any idea what the military does. I don't blame you for it...on the contrary, I try to help you get more information so that you can be better informed.

And if you notice, I didn't say a word about not cutting the military. I asked about the hypocrisy of "heavily cutting the military" while allowing Medicare and Medicaid to take up more than double our military expenditures....and about 6x more in spending than they bring in in revenue.

You'd rather overspend on health care than spend anything on defense, that's fine. I'd rather not. I just believe that my belief is based on an existing worldview, rather than a utopian ideal of what one wishes it would be, a world where we're more evil than the Soviets and only have enemies because we helped them become that way.

 

LOL @ "my golden goose"...

I've said that military spending should be cut, will be cut and has been working on plans for "doomsday" cuts. But a 20% cut in the military across the board (which would be pretty crippling and start to affect things that the average Joe cares about) would only give you the cash for 1/7th of the OVERRUN of Medicare and Medicaid. Completely defunding the military and transferring every dollar to M/M still wouldn't allow you to break even there. I find it laughable that those who are talking about military spending cuts who don't acknowledge the entitlement programs. That's all.

As far as a philosophy debate over how much of a military we need--we can do that in another thread. But to bring up "significantly smaller military" as a part of a plan for "smaller gov't" won't do what you think it will do.

 

Agree.

 

quickly, b/c I had a better post on this in one of the other threads...

I think it's not feasible to say that you want to "protect US citizens and interests" without having a military projected around the world. Not in today's climate or economy.

As far as AFG in particular, it's dumb to say "end military activities there." The MASSIVE MAJORITY of the populace wants us there until the ANSF can take over in numbers that would support their defense against the pakistani-based terrorist groups. It's not like Vietnam or even Iraq. We ARE making a strategic alliance right now with AFG. We're training their people on how a professional police and military organization under civilian control is run. We are on a plan to have almost all of our troops (except me and people like me) gone by Christmas 2014...it would not be smart to move that timeline just b/c a new politician were President--which is why you heard almost nothing about AFG during the entire campaign; both candidates realize that. Once 2014 rolls around and the ANSF is able to take over everywhere in the country with a reasonable chance for success, it's going to cost around 4B a year to keep funding them. At that point the AFG gov't won't have the tax revenue to handle that, but if we can keep those guys in a semblance of a professional military and police that can keep warlords and/or terrorist insurgents from wreaking havoc, a) we won't need to be there and can ensure that our troops don't have to go back.

I'm also against "torture" and indefinite detainment. I'm all for quick military tribunals for everyone. Unfortunately for them, most of them would be found guilty of a death-penalty offense and can be executed without anyone knowing until the UN has to be notified at the "end of the emergency" for tribunals affecting non-citizens found armed in support of an insurrection. That's the UN definition, not ours.

As far as "leave it to the AFG people to figure out their challenges", that's pretty irresponsible, imho. The rest of the world has contributed directly or indirectly to about 35 years of a non-functioning society that they didn't choose, but now we leave them to clean it up and figure out their own problems?

I agree that it's time to reevaluate troop deployments in Europe, Japan and Korea. But I wonder why it was ok to keep troops in Germany and Japan for 70 years (and 25 years after the end of the Cold War), but as we're going on Year 6 of "occupation" of AFG, it's time to pull the troops home without evaluation--even though the people want us there way more than the japanese or Germans or Italians ever did (maybe the Koreans wanted us there as much). Is it b/c they're Muslim?