There is a campaign among the military-industrialists to set a floor on defense spending at 4% of GDP as “the only way we can stop the inexorable slide of national defense.”
The Bush Administration requested $541 billion for national defense in FY 2009. [...] The Administration also submitted a separate $70 billion placeholder request for ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Secretary of Defense Gates later provided an updated estimate of $170 billion for FY 2009.18
[...]
This means the United States will spend significantly more, in inflation-adjusted dollars, for defense in FY 2009 than it did during the peak years of the Korean War (1953; $545 billion), the Vietnam War (1968; $550 billion), or the 1980s Reagan-era buildup (1989; $522 billion).19 The United States is also projected to spend more on defense in FY 2009 than the next 45 highest spending countries combined, including 5.8 times more than China (second highest), 10.2 times more than Russia (third highest), and98.6 times more than Iran (22d highest). Indeed, the United States is expected to account for 48 percent of the world’s total military spending in FY 2009.
So why the discrepancy? Military-industrialists say that military spending is a falling proportion of GDP while these numbers say that dollar amount is increasing. The answer is, of course, that GDP is increasing.
His numbers are 4 years out of date, but Ben (of Ben and Jerry’s) explained it well with Oreos
or, if you prefer, an old-fashioned pie chart.
This handy-dandy poster has more up-to-date (2009) numbers:
The blogosphere is positively throbbing with indignation over Kathleen Parker’s column in the post where she coined a lively new phrase for the branch of the Republican party that most troubles the rest of us:
To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.
A lot of type has moved over what exactly she meant by oogedy-boogedy. Those looking to be offended thought she was just being rude about religious beliefs and superstition but I think Publius explained her best:
Personally, I think the oogedy-boogedyness stems from fear – on some level, liberals are simply afraid of social conservatives. Fairly or no, liberals perceive them as a direct and credible threat to their own personal liberties.
Interestingly, this same fear is precisely why social conservatives loathe liberals – on some level, they are afraid of us.
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Social conservatives aren’t merely a group with which liberals disagree – they’re a group perceived to threaten our lives in tangible ways.
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This perceived sense of attack is especially strong on sexual privacy issues. It’s not so much the substantive disagreement that is driving liberals’ loathing. It’s the perception that the Christian Right would intrude on – and dictate – the most intimate decisions of people’s lives. For many women (and men), the idea of forced pregnancy and contraception bans aren’t abstract arguments – they’re pretty terrifying.
Same deal with Terri Schiavo. Again, what was so oogedy about l’affaire Schiavo is not the abstract philosophical debate about “life.” It was that a group of frenzied social conservatives decided to intrude on the Schiavos’ privacy, publicizing and overruling a private and wrenching family decision. Even worse, they actually convinced Congress – in the midst of two wars – to intervene.
[...]
Anyway, the larger point is that there actually are substantive explanations for people’s hostility to social conservatives. It’s not that people are snobs or bigots. It’s that they see the social conservative agenda as a direct threat to some of their most cherished and intimate rights.
Remember the Iraq War? Now that Bush and Maliki have agreed on the timetable for withdrawal that amounted to surrender back when democrats supported it, Andy McCarthy, in the Nation Review, suddenly notices that
INCONVENIENT FACT: THE IRAQIS DON’T LIKE US This last point is the one that gnaws. Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in Iraqi democracy remains tenuous (our interest was the elimination of Saddam’s terror-mongering, weapons-proliferating regime), and (b) Americans were assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf. Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates. That stubborn fact complicates everything.
Yesterday, speaking about the SOFA on condition of anonymity, a senior administration official acknowledged as much: “We’re still not popular with the Iraqis.” That’s putting it mildly.
It’s almost as if they don’t think of us as liberators.
McCarthy ends by wondering whether Iraq would be an ally in a future war with Iran. Eric Martin at Obsidian Wings answers
First, the question of the allegiance of Iraq’s governemt answers itself: We have overseen the ascendance of political parties that were either formed in Iran by the Iranians, or had been housed in Iran for decades prior to the invasion. These parties have, naturally, very close ties to Iran. They will not, absent Iranian aggression or extreme overreach, go to war with Iran at our behest, or permit us to do the same from their soil. Nor do large segments of the Iraqi population, who have had the benefit of an up close view of the splendors of shock and awe, wish to visit such a fate on neighboring Iran.
Second, if victory in Iraq means an Iraq that is both free of al-Qaeda and an ally against Iran, then we had already won before we invaded, and then squandered our winnings through the invasion itself. By invading, we allowed a previously non-existent AQI to emerge while greatly empowering Iran by removing its longtime regional adversary and replacing Saddam with extremely Iran-friendly political parties like ISCI and Maliki’s Dawa.
Then the evolutionary biologist David Barash spoke about redirected aggression, recounting a story about how when his horse kicked his dog, his dog bit the horse. That’s directed aggression. More often than not, however, when A kicks B, B kicks C. Why? Reputation. If B does not kick C then others will start kicking him. (This assumes that if you kick A back, he’ll kick your butt for good.) Bush’s invasion of Iraq was redirected aggression from 9/11, says Barash, because there is no definitive state of Al Qaeda to kick back.
This one matches my expectations - and I like his conclusion:
why in the world did Proposition 8 — banning gay marriage — pass in my hyper-liberal state of California? I put the question to Hamer. His answer: a lot of liberals, especially in the African-American community, consider marriage to be a separate issue from other civil rights, and thus we’ve got a ways to go for gays to achieve equal standing under the law. Hamer cited one study in which people were asked “Do you think homosexuality is a choice or are people born that way?” Americans were split 50/50. But when asked “Should gays be allowed to marry?” the answer was an overwhelming “No” for those who think homosexuality is a choice, and “Yes” for those who think gays are born that way. Since the science shows that homosexuality is not a choice, one solution to the political civil liberties issue is more science research and better science education.
Sometimes in the middle autumn days,
The windless days when the swallows have flown,
And the sere elms brood in the mist,
Each tree a being, rapt, alone,
I know, not as in barren thought,
But wordlessly, as the bones know,
What quenching of my brain, what numbness,
Wait in the dark grave where I go.
And I see the people thronging the street,
The death-marked people, they and I
Goalless, rootless, like leaves drifting,
Blind to the earth and to the sky;
Nothing believing, nothing loving,
Not in joy nor in pain, not heeding the stream
Of precious life that flows within us,
But fighting, toiling as in a dream.
So shall we in the rout of life
Some thought, some faith, some meaning save,
And speak it once before we go
In silence to the silent grave …
A generation ago, Republicans were dominant among college graduates. Those days are long gone. Since 1988, Democrats have become more conservative on economics - and Republicans more conservative on social issues. College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with Democrats - but that their values are under threat from Republicans. There are more and more college-educated voters.
So the question for the GOP is: Will it pursue them? This will involve painful change, on issues ranging from the environment to abortion. It will involve even more painful changes of style and tone: toward a future that is less overtly religious, less negligent with policy, and less polarising on social issues.
That’s a future that leaves little room for Sarah Palin - but the only hope for a Republican recovery.
As much as I have been looking forward to an Obama victory, I have been looking forward to this almost as much.
Conservatism in the United States faces a series of extremely knotty problems at the moment. How do you restrain the welfare state at a time when the entitlements we have are broadly popular, and yet their design puts them on a glide path to insolvency? How do you respond to the socioeconomic trends - wage stagnation, social immobility, rising health care costs, family breakdown, and so forth - that are slowly undermining support for the Reaganite model of low-tax capitalism? How do you sell socially-conservative ideas to a moderate middle that often perceives social conservatism as intolerant? How do you transform an increasingly white party with a history of benefiting from racially-charged issues into a party that can win majorities in an increasingly multiracial America? etc.
Those are really great questions and the kind of questions I might ask.
The country needs a Republican party that can give sensible answers to difficult questions like those, but I fear that we’ll have to endure a few more years of fire and brimstone and government-knows-best, anti-intellectual evangelicals before the sensible conservatives get their hands back on the steering wheel.
The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.
Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.
It might be something to do with the fact that
According to recent Gallup polls, the president’s average approval rating is below 30% — down from his 90% approval in the wake of 9/11. Mr. Bush has endured relentless attacks from the left while facing abandonment from the right.
No doubt the WSJ will be supportive of the new administration. For fear of encouraging our enemies.
