The RINOs who voted for cloture on Hagel must be primaried

By the time of this writing (Feb. 22nd), several RINO Senators – Mike Johanns and Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, John McCain-Feingold of Arizona, Lindsey Gramnesty of South Carolina, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Susan Collins of Maine, intend to vote for cloture (i.e. breaking the filibuster) on Chuck Hagel’s nomination for SECDEF, thus allowing it to proceed to the floor, where it is sure to pass as the Democrats have 55 votes.

If these RINO traitors vote for cloture and thus vote to allow the Democrats to confirm Hagel along party lines (which, BTW, would be a first for a SECDEF nominee), we must vote them out of office. All of them. No ifs, no buts.

We must primary all of them (including the pseudo-conservative Deb Fischer) and, if they somehow survive the primary, support their general election opponents.

No forgiveness, no ifs or buts, and no get-outta-jail-free-cards for McCain.

But first: why should Hagel’s nomination be filibustered?

As myself and many other conservative writers have chronicled in great detail over the past several weeks, Chuck Hagel is a strident leftist (despite being a nominal Republican) who is implacably hostile to Israel (and to Jews in general), friendly to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran (which has endorsed him), supports the gutting of America’s defense and deep unilateral cuts in America’s nuclear deterrent, and is totally unqualified to be SECDEF due to his lack of high-level executive experience, ignorance of defense issues, and inability to perform well even before the Senate (as his confirmation hearing proved).

And yet, despite all of these facts, and despite more Americans opposing than supporting Hagel, Senate Democrats, pressured by the Obama Administration, are marching in partisan lockstep with each other and with the White House and all intend to vote to confirm Hagel.

And they have 55 seats in the Senate – enough to confirm Hagel.

Make no mistake: if the filibuster is ended (i.e. if cloture is invoked) on Hagel’s nomination, the Dems will be able to confirm him along party lines with their 55 votes.

A vote to end the filibuster (i.e. invote cloture) on Hagel’s nomination is therefore a vote to confirm Hagel as SECDEF. There is no material difference between the two.

Those Republicans who intend to vote to end the filibuster thus essentially plan to vote to allow the Democrats to confirm Hagel.

These Republican traitors must NOT be allowed to hide behind a meaningless final, nominal vote against Hagel’s confirmation, when it will be too late to stop his nomination as the Democrats have the votes to confirm him.

Make no mistake: a vote to invoke cloture on Hagel is a vote to confirm Hagel.

So what can we do?

Niceties won’t work with these worthless RINOs. Nor will reason and facts. They are immune to reason and facts.

The only thing they understand and fear is a credible threat of losing their seats – because the only thing Washington politicians – including newcomers – care about is getting reelected. And if a credible threat to vote them out of office is made, they usually DO really start voting against Democratic proposals.

So you MUST call or write to both of your Senators (especially if one of your Senators is one of the worthless RINOs listed above, i.e. if you live in Arizona, SC, Nebraska, Alabama, Alaska, Maine, or Mississippi) and tell them that you will NEVER vote for them again if they vote to invoke cloture on Hagel’s nomination, and that you will not be fooled by a meaningless final vote against Hagel’s confirmation when it will already be a done deal.

Tell them that if they vote to invoke cloture on Hagel, you will wholeheartedly support primary challengers against them and if they somehow survive their primaries you will support their general election opponents.

And if these worthless RINOs nonetheless ignore this warning, we must follow it through and throw each one of them out of the Senate. No ifs, no buts.

Johanns is retiring in 2014, so we can’t hold him accountable, but we can hold the rest of these RINOs accountable.

Worthless RINO Waterboarding-Is-Torture-Bush-Tax-Cuts-For-The-Rich-Cap-And-Trade-My-Good-Friend-Ted-Kennedy’s-Amnesty-John-McCain-Feingold must be voted out of office, no matter what the National Establishment Review says. We must support whoever his primary challenger will be, and if he somehow survives the primary, we must support his general election opponent. By 2016, Republicans should have a secure Senate majority, so if need be, we can afford to sacrifice this one seat.

The same must also apply to all other RINOs listed above. McCain and Murkowski are up for reelection in 2016. But Lindsey Gramnasty and Susan Collins are up for reelection next year. Not in 2016, not in 2018, but next year – in 2014!

We must make it unmistakably clear to them that BOTH of them (and the other RINOs listed above) will be voted out of office if they vote to invoke cloture on Hagel.

Already, there is talk about primarying Gramnasty, and his endorsement of the McCain-Schumer amnesty proposal will certainly not endear him anyone. We must join hands with those who oppose amnesty for illegal aliens (among whom I count myself) to oust Gramnasty and McCain out of office.

And remember: with the sole exception of Maine, all of the states which these RINOs represent are solidly-red, Republican states. It is totally unacceptable that these states are represented by RINOs. Whoever wins the Republican nomination there – unless it’s a Todd Akin clone – should be able to easily win the general election there as well. This is not Maine, Wisconsin, Illinois, or Delaware that we’re talking about, this is the red-hot states of Arizona, South Carolina, Mississippi, Nebraska, Alaska, and Alabama.

Politicians must be held accountable for EVERY vote they cast. And the only way to hold them accountable is to vote them out of office. Which is what must happen to the worthless RINOs listed above.

Retaking the Senate in 2014 is pure moonshine

Republicans don’t even know what peril their chances of retaking their Senate are in. They’re even smaller than I previously thought. They’re almost nonexistent.

It appears that my worst fears and predictions will come to fruition.

Readers may recall that, a week ago, I warned Republicans against getting involved in protracted primary battles that only weaken Republican nominees for the general election (and thus serve only the Democrats), against nominating extremist, firebreather, unelectable candidates like Steve King and Paul Broun, and against listening to extremist organizations like the Club for Growth of the Democratic Caucus.

It is now clear that my worst fears and predictions will come to fruition.

Let me be blunt: Barring a massive scandal hitting Senate Democrats before the election, Republicans stand absolutely no chance of retaking the Senate in 2014. At best, they may pick up a few seats to add to their currently meagre 45 seats. At worst, they could again lose, on net, seats, as they did last year thanks to extremist candidates like Richard Mourdock.

I’ll show you why. Let’s go through the Senate races that really matter, state by state.

In Iowa, where Tom Harkin’s decision to retire opened a great opportunity for a GOP pickup, Republicans are now hell-bent on throwing that opportunity away by nominating extremist, firebreather candidate Steve King, who currently gets over 50% of the votes in GOP primary polls. General election polling, however, shows that King would get CRUSHED in a general election by Bruce Brayley (who is the odds-on favorite for the Dem nomination) and by former Iowa Gov. Chet Culver.

Repeat after me: Steve King is utterly unelectable.

Iowa Republicans are hell-bent on throwing this great opportunity away and rejecting electable, solid conservative Tom Latham, whom some have smeared as being “close to John Boehner”.

Georgia Republicans are no smarter. After forcing solid conservative, FairTax supporter, strong defense advocate, New START opponent Saxby Chambliss to retire, they’re now hell bent on nominating firebreather Paul Broun, who is even more extremist than Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock (he says that the evolution theory and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell”). Not one moderate, woman, or black will vote for this guy.

Todd Adkin and Richard Mourdock actually stand a moderate chance of winning – before they opened their mouths and started pontificating about abortion and rape. Paul Broun hasn’t commented on abortion and rape yet, and he’s already doomed to defeat: polls are showing he would get CRUSHED by the most popular Georgia Democrat, Max Cleland, and would probably lose to Congressman John Barrow as well.

Recently, another potential (though not yet declared) candidate, Rep. Phil Gingrey (another Todd Akin clone), has begun to gain steam and even to overtake Broun in potential primary polls. But like Broun, Gingrey would get trounced by Max Cleland (a household name in Georgia) and would likely be defeated by John Barrow as well, though by a smaller margin.

(Last year, when Todd Akin made his infamous rape remark, Gingrey agreed with him, saying he was “partially right”. All Republicans would have to do to beat Gingrey would be to play that remark on a televised loop until their candidate got over the top.)

King, Broun, and Gingrey are extremist morons of the same type as Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. The only differences here are the names of the candidates and the states where they’re running.

In West Virginia, the Club for Growth of the Democratic Caucus is grousing about primarying Shelley Moore Capito. Still, no one has actually dared to challenge Capito yet, and if she wins the primary, she should be fine.

In Louisiana, North Carolina, and New Hampshire, Republicans are not seriously considering any extremist candidates (and Lousiana Republicans tend to be more adroit than their Georgia and Iowa colleagues), but the problem there is a very familiar one: the incumbency problem. Next year, most election prognosticators will probably be proven wrong, except one: incumbents usually win.

In LA and NC, incumbent Senators Mary Landrieu and Kay Hagan are leading all potential Republican challengers by double-digit margins and have full campaign coffers. And we shouldn’t be surprised – Mary Landrieu has already won three Senate elections in Louisiana and has never lost one. NH Senator Jeanne Shaheen also leads all comers, though not by double-digit margins and has only ca. $300,000 on hand for reelection, and Republicans don’t have a deep bench in NH.

In Alaska, likewise, even the strongest Republican candidate, Mead Treadwell, is behind incumbent Mark Begich by a large margin (8 pp), although 14% of Alaskans are still undecided, so Treadwell may yet win. Especially given that the election won’t be held until November 2014.

In Montana, Republicans have only one candidate capable of defeating incumbent Senator Max Baucus and popular former Governor Brian Schweitzer. That candidate is Marc Racicot. Currently, Dem primary polls show Schweitzer trouncing Baucus in the Dem primary, so he’s almost certain to be the candidate Republicans will face. And yet, Racicot hasn’t even decided whether he’ll join the race, even though he’s the ONLY Republican capable of winning there.

The only seats that Republicans currently have a realistic chance of winning are those of Tim Johnson (D-SD) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) – and that’s only if Capito is the nominee in WV – plus perhaps that of Mark Begich if Mead Treadwell wins the GOP nomination without drama and then wins over the undecideds and Max Baucus’s if Marc Racicot is the nominee.

But that would be a gain of just 4 seats – and Republicans are sure to lose that of Saxby Chambliss, thanks to the extremists who forced him to retire and who support Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey – two clones of Todd Akin.

So the best result Republicans can hope for is to win 3 seats on net – just 50% of what they need (6 seats) to gain majority in the Senate. In the worst case scenario, they could win no seats on net and lose one (in Georgia), reducing their ranks in the Senate to 44 people and making a Republican takeover of the Senate more difficult in 2016.

Repeat after me: Retaking the Senate in 2014 is pure moonshine. The GOP will not accomplish this, thanks to morons like Steve King, Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey, Chris Chocola, the Club for Growth of the Democratic Caucus, the morons who forced Saxby Chambliss to retire, and the idiots who are openly grousing about primarying Shelley Capito and Mead Treadwell.

In other words, as in 2010 and 2012, the Club, the Tea Party, and other extremists will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Rebuttal of the “sequestration is just a cut in the rate of growth” lie

Ever since the sequester’s inception in August 2011 under the Budget Control Act, many ignorant people, including many anti-defense hacks (such as Mercatus Center’s Veronique de Rugy, AmSpec’s Matt Purple, HumanEvents’ David Harsanyi, POGO’s Danielle Brian, TIME magazine’s Mark Thompson, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and CATO Institute anti-defense hacks) have falsely and repeatedly claimed that sequestration, even WRT defense spending, is a mere cut in the rate of growth, not a real-term cut. They have been repeating that lie incessantly since the sequester’s inception.

But repeating a lie 100 times doesn’t make it true, contrary to the opinion of their godfather Joseph Goebbels. It’s still a blatant lie, and the people spreading it are children of the Father of Lies himself.

For the purposes of this article, a spending cut is defined the way reasonable people would define it: as a situation whereby next year’s spending level is lower than previous year’s.

Also, as always, I will look at the sequester’s impact on defense spending throughout the next decade (FY2013-FY2022), NOT merely at the remainder of FY2013 or on FY2014. The entire decade matters – especially given that some of sequestration’s consequences will not emerge immediately, but later on during the Sequestration Decade.

Sequestration, for those not yet familiar with it, is an automatic process whereby the discretionary portion of the federal budget (but not the mandatory portion, i.e. not entitlements or debt interest) will be significantly and automatically cut – and by far the heaviest cuts, over 60% of the total, will fall on the defense budget. This will reduce defense spending deeply below today’s levels ($525 bn)  in a salami-slicing manner – by automatically cutting everything outside military personnel accounts by 10%. The DOD is not allowed any flexibility in where to make the cuts; it is obligated to cut everything, no matter how important (or unimportant) by 10%. (Not that such deep cuts could be done safely even in a targeted manner, but that’s another story.)

The most accurate, most authoritative report on this subject to date has been compiled by the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO published that report on July 11th, 2012 – almost a year after the BCA became law.

In that report, in Table 1-4, which you can find on page 11, the CBO says what exact caps would there be for defense (and nondefense discretionary) spending under each year from FY2013 through FY2022. The CBO gives such figures in both nominal dollars (unadjusted for inflation) and real-term dollars (i.e. adjusted for inflation, which erodes the value of the dollar over time – significantly over a decade).

In inflation-adjusted, real-term dollars, the lowered budget caps under sequestration for defense would be as follows: $469 bn in FY2013,  $472 bn in FY2014, $475 bn in FY2015, $477 bn in FY2016, $480 in FY2017, $483 bn in FY2018, $485 bn in FY2019, $487 bn in FY2020, $489 bn in FY2021, and $493 bn in FY2022.

The current (pre-sequestration FY2013) budget cap for base defense spending is $525 bn.

This means that by FY2022, at the end of the “Sequestration Decade”, the defense budget will still be $32 bn SMALLER than it is today, and a year earlier, in FY2021, when Veronique de Rugy falsely claims it will be 18% larger, it will actually be $34 bn (i.e. 6.47%) SMALLER than it is today.

Below is a graph nicely illustrating this, also courtesy of the CBO:

 

Nor is sequestration the first real-term cut to defense spending since 2009. Already the first tranche of cuts mandated by the BCA required real-term (though not deep) cuts to defense spending: from $531 bn in FY2012 to $525 bn today. So today’s defense budget, even before sequestration, is already smaller than last year’s.

Nor does adding defense programs outside the DOD’s budget (and there aren’t many of them) to the mix help those who pooh-pooh sequestration. If such programs’ budgets (which, by the way, are ALSO subject to sequestration) are added to defense budgets for later years, they must also be included in this year’s pre-sequestration budget. Which means that the depth of the cuts (and their realness) remains the same, only the starting and final numbers change slightly.

Nor can the DOD and the Congress look to war (OCO) accounts to shore up the base defense budgets, because war accounts, like all discretionary spending, are ALSO subject to sequestration. That’s the problem with sequestration: it treats the entire military budget, and all other national-security-related spending, as sequestrable. Unspent balances from previous years are also subject to sequestration.

Therefore, the DOD and the Congress cannot increase war spending to patch up base defense budget accounts; doing so would require changing the sequestration mechamism itself, and with it, the Budget Control Act itself.

It needs to be stated one more time, to refute the libertarian lie: SEQUESTRATION IS NOT A MERE REDUCTION IN THE RATE OF GROWTH OF DEFENSE SPENDING. UNDER SEQUESTRATION, THERE WILL BE NO GROWTH IN DEFENSE SPENDING AT ALL, COMPARED TO TODAY’S LEVELS. UNDER SEQUESTRATION, DEFENSE SPENDING WILL STILL BE DEEPLY BELOW TODAY’S LEVEL A DECADE FROM NOW, IN FY2022.

Any claim to the contrary is a blatant lie, and the people spreading such lies are children of the Father of Lies himself.

For more on sequestration, see this.

Rebuttal of the “we can considerably cut defense spending with no risk to security” lie

In a recent 3-minute video, Christopher Preble of the CATO Institute falsely claimed that the US could “spending considerably less on defense at no cost to security”. That was just one of the many blatant lies made in the video; it, like others, was refuted in a recent article, but this lie was particularly blatant and egregious, and therefore, I have decided to write a more detailed rebuttal.

The claim that the US can “spend considerably less on defense at no cost to security” is a blatant lie.

Firstly, any large-scale defense spending cuts would have to “come out of somewhere”, i.e. something specific would have to be cut deeply to make large cuts to the defense budget topline.

There isn’t nearly as much waste in the defense budget as is often alleged, and not nearly enough to allow for deep cuts, so any steep topline cuts would have to result in deep cuts in one or more of the following:

• The number of military personnel and the care they receive;
• The military’s force structure (i.e. its size and the number and size of its units);
• Training and the maintenance of existing equipment and bases;
• The execution of missions (ranging from air patrols over the US to submarine patrols to fighting pirates);
• The development and acquisition of new equipment – from ships to aircraft, to ground vehicles, to munitions.

Deep cuts in any of these areas would severely weaken the US military. This is because:

• With little or no new equipment, the US will not be able to defeat its enemies, who are fielding very modern, very good weapons in rapidly growing quantities, and the US military’s current, aging, worn-out equipment will eventually wear out and age out (i.e. reach the end of its service life) – sooner rather than later.
• Poorly trained people wouldn’t be able to defeat anyone – not even a trivial enemy. Troops need much time to gain and hone their skills (whether in seamanship, piloting aircraft, or marksmanship); if training funding is dramatically cut, they will lose those skills, which will take a lot of time and money to regain.
• Significantly cutting funding for missions means that many, if not most, missions would not be executed.
• Significantly cutting funding for maintenance means, of course, that much, if not most of the military’s current equipment and bases would not be properly maintained. There wouldn’t be enough spare funds and fuel for the equipment, nor enough money for the maintenance and renovation of military installations – thus turning them into slums, as happened during the 1990s.
• Significantly cutting the force structure would make the US military – which has already been dramatically cut across the board since the end of the Cold War – unable to defend the US, not to mention its allies, because there wouldn’t be enough people, ships, planes, and ground platforms to defend even the US itself (a huge country with long land borders, 3 long coasts, and a huge population), let alone its interests around the world or its allies. It could also mean cutting the already barely-adequate US nuclear deterrent, which could invite a nuclear first strike on the US by Russia or China.

No, the US could not “considerably reduce defense spending at no cost to security”. Not even close.

Deep cuts in defense spending on the scale of sequestration would have the consequences of sequestration. And what would those consequences be? The Joint Chiefs of Staff explained this precisely during a recent HASC hearing.

Among these would be:

• Ceasing of deployment of at least one carrier and of any amphibious assault ships to the Persian Gulf, and of any warships to the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the Horn of Africa;
• Ceasing of deployment of any ships to the Carribean and of the drug interdiction mission there;
• Ceasing of the Marines’ many missions around the world, including deployments to the Philippines, Japan, Pakistan, and many countries elsewhere around the world  (including the Persian Gulf, “to do the nation’s bidding there” as the USMC Commandant said) and deep cuts in the force structure, training equipment maintenance, and modernization of the Marine Corps; the Marine Corps would have to ground at least 4 of its 9 F/A-18 Hornet squadrons;
• Deep cuts in the force structure (to the tune of 200,000 soldiers), training, and modernization programs of the Army (78% of Army brigades would not receive the training they need);
• Delaying hundreds of base repair and renovation projects around the country (note: in the US, not just abroad)
• Deep cuts in the USAF’s flight training programs – both basic and advanced – leading to woefully undertrained pilots; possibly also cuts to the long range strike bomber program due to topline cuts;
• Cuts to the number of hours during which missile attack warning radars would be operational; and
• Deep cuts in everything the National Guard does – from training, to equipment, to missions.

You can (and should) listen to the Joint Chiefs here.

And as the Joint Chiefs have made clear, the problem with sequestration is BOTH its salami-slicing method AND its magnitude; Gen. Dempsey, their chairman, has even said that “I can’t give you another dollar” if the nation continues to ask the military to do what it’s doing today.

Some will likely say, “Then let’s start jettisoning missions and commitments!”. But that would also be a foolish mistake which would cost the US dearly in terms of security.

Those who advocate deep defense cuts need to be forced to say which exact missions do they want the military to cease performing, and forced to admit that foregoing many of these missions would cost America dearly in terms of security.

Significant cuts in defense spending cannot be made solely by terminating the defense commitment to Europe (through NATO) and to South Korea (and dumping those allies in the face of rapidly arming and increasingly aggressive Russia and North Korea, as both of them grow and modernize their nuclear and ICBM arsenals, would be a huge blunder, BTW).

Jettisoning those two commitments will not come even close to paying for the deep defense cuts that some people demand.

Such cuts would mean going far deeper than that and jettisoning entire missions crucial to America’s own security: air superiority, sea control, ground superiority, early warning, ISR, cyberwarfare, nuclear deterrence, missile defense, etc.

Scrapping any of these crucial missions – all of which are crucial for and directly related to the security of the US homeland (to say nothing of America’s interests or its allies) – would severely imperil US security, because you can’t be secure if you don’t control the air, sea, ground, space, and cyberspace, don’t receive early warning of incoming attack, or cannot provide nuclear deterrence and missile defense to your own country (let alone to allies, who will have to develop their own nuclear weapons if the US doesn’t continue to provide a large nuclear umbrella; this would make the nuclear proliferation problem so much worse).

Then there is the threat environment. Despite the CATO Institute’s and other anti-defense organizations’ blatant lies that the threat to US security has dramatically declined since the end of the Cold War (it was true during the 1990s, but it is no longer true today, due to China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran), the world is currently more dangerous than at any time during the Cold War (except maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis) – as the Joint Chiefs have testified. During the Cold War, the US had to deal only with the Soviet Union and its clients; today, the US has to deter China, a resurgent Russia buoyed by huge oil revenues, North Korea (which now has nuclear weapons and ICBMs capable of reaching the US), and Iran, which is speeding towards nuclear weapons and has an assymetric arsenal of weapons capable of crippling the US military in the Gulf through A2/AD weapons and tactics.

Detailed analysis of Russia’s and China’s capabilities is available here and here.

Some, including CATO, claim that “the US has significantly cut its defense spending after every major war; it’s normal”. But it was a grave mistake, and the US deeply regretted it (later on) everytime it did that.

In the 20th century, five times US policymakers and citizens wrongly concluded after major wars that there was no longer any significant threat, that mankind had changed for the better, and that the US military could be cut deeply; and they proceeded to cut it severely.

Everytime they did that, they regretted it later on, because the military was gutted and unready for other, including future, threats; America was drawn (usually unwillingly) into a new major war; and the military had to be painstakingly rebuilt at a much higher fiscal cost than what it would’ve cost to maintain high readiness permanently.

So defense cuts don’t even save any money in the long term – they only lead to war (provoked through America’s weakness) and to much higher defense rebuilding costs (as well as human casualties) later on. Thus, they’re not only suicidal, but also immoral, because people needlessly die as a result of deep defense cuts.

No, America cannot afford to “spend considerably less on defense at no cost to security”. “Considerable” defense cuts lead to a significantly weaker military – for the reasons I stated above.

Rebuttal of Rand Paul’s and the CATO Institute’s blatant lies

The George-Soros-funded CATO Institute has recently put out a 3-minute video titled “The Truth About Sequestration” which, however, is a litany of blatant lies about sequestration and defense issues. They claim, inter alia, that sequestration would be only a “one-year cut” in defense spending; that by the end of the sequestration decade, defense spending would be $100 bn higher than this FY; that America can afford to “spend considerably less on defense at no cost in national security”; that defense spending has increased by over 90% since FY1998; that military spending constitutes only one quarter of the total federal budget; and that America’s military spending actually makes America less secure.

Traitor Rand Paul has picked up that liberal propaganda video and shamelessly propagates it on his Facebook page, claiming that sequestration will not cut defense spending at all and will only be “a reduction in the rate of growth” of defense spending.

The only problem is that the claims made in this video and by Sen. Paul on his page are blatant lies, at least as far as defense spending is concerned. No, sequestration would NOT be a mere reduction in the rate of increase, nor would it be a one-year cut – it would be a real, deep, immediate, and permanent reduction in the defense budget. It would cut the base defense budget from $525 bn today to $469 bn on March 1st, and even a decade from now, in FY2022, it would be at a mere $493 bn – $32 bn below today’s level.

All the while OCO (war) spending is shrinking steadily and is set to disappear in FY2016. DOE, DHS, and State Department spending is ALSO subject to sequestration.No, sequestration is not a mere “reduction in the rate of increase” nor a mere “one-year cut” – it’s a real, deep, immediate, and permanent cut in defense spending. Here’s the proof in graphic version.

The claim that sequestration would set defense spending back “only” to “2006 or 2007 levels” (as if that weren’t a deep cut) is also a blatant lie – sequestration, by cutting it to $469 bn on March 1st, would cut it down to FY2003 levels (in FY2004, the base defense budget was $472 bn – MORE than what would be allowed under sequestration in March). The defense budget would actually not return to FY2007 levels until FY2022! And the claim that defense spending levels in FY2006 or FY2007 were “excessive” is also a lie – they were not excessive then, and they would be woefully inadequate now, considering how much the Chinese and Russian military buildups, and the nuclear and ballistic missile programs of North Korea and Iran, have progressed since then.

Listen to the Joint Chiefs testifying just a week ago, folks. Listen to them talking about how severely deep defense cuts would weaken America’s defense: http://armedservices.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=156

If the defense budget were to be “considerably” reduced, jettisoning missions like commitments to allies would NOT be enough, because a large military of a size no smaller than that of today would STILL be needed to protect the US itself. So “considerably less defense spending” would have to mean considerably fewer troops, weapons, munitions, and weapon programs to defend America itself, as well as far fewer training hours/days and far fewer installations at which to disperse the force (thus making it much less survivable because of a lack of dispersal).

Defense cannot be provided for on the cheap.

The claim that military spending has grown by over 90% since FY1998 is also a blatant lie – the correct figure is around 70% – and it’s irrelevant in any case, because FY1998 was the post-WW2 nadir of defense spending – the nadir of the Clinton-era massive defense cuts which gutted the military that the Bush Administration later tried to rebuild.

The claim that the US will be spending $100 bn more on defense in FY2022/FY2023 than now is a blatant lie, as demonstrated above (it will actually be $32 bn LOWER than it is today).

The claim that America’s military spending somehow undermines US national security is a blatant lie; it does not undermine US national security in any way whatsoever. It actually SAFEGUARDS America’s nat-sec by funding the troops, training, equipment, installations, and missions needed to protect America and its national interests abroad.

The claim that the US could deeply cut its defense budget and still be the world’s top military power and still be secure is also a blatant lie. The Chinese and Russian militaries have already closed most of the gaps between them and the US military and are working hard to close the remaining few gaps. They are far more capable than most people give them credit for. I have done tons of detailed analysis of them, available on my website (http://zbigniewmazurak.wordpress.com).

The claim that “security threats have declined since the end of the Cold War” is only partially true – they did decline after 1991, but the calm, relatively peaceful decade of the 1990s is long over. Today, the world is more dangerous, and the US faces more security threats of greater magnitude and complexity, than at any point during the Cold War, except maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis, as confirmed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The idea that the US can afford to dramatically cut its defense budget, capabilities, and size of its military is so false and so ridiculous that only ideological libertarians like Rand Paul and the CATO Institute crowd could believe them.

As for NATO, the US has withdrawn the vast majority of its troops in Europe after 1991.

I would like to add one more thing, regarding past defense cuts: every past round of deep defense cuts – the one that followed the end of WW1, WW2, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the end of the Cold War – resulted in the gutting of the military, in terms of size, training, equipment, material readiness, etc. EVERYTIME that America conducted such a round of deep defense cuts, these cuts later had to be reversed at a much higher cost than what it would’ve cost to simply keep the military strong at all times. And each time, these defense cuts cuts have caused America to be unprepared for the threats of the future and the next war, into which the US was usually drawn unwillingly, Vietnam being the sole exception. As former SECDEF Robert Gates, in the past, five times American policymakers and citizens concluded that the world had changed for the better and decided to dramatically cut the military. The result was always the same – a new, unexpected war that America was drawn into and unprepared for, emboldened enemies attacking others with impunity, and the necessity to rebuild the military at a high fiscal cost. It is IMPERATIVE not to repeat that mistake again.

Shame on the Soros-funded CATO Institute and on you, Senator, for lying so blatantly.

Why deep defense cuts MUST be avoided at all costs

I could just as well title this article “why defense must always be fully funded” or “why America must always maintain a strong, second-to-none defense”, but all three titles effectively mean the same thing, so I have chosen the above one.

We are being told from all directions by various kinds of people – from liberals like Clinton Admin official Gordon Adams to libertarians like Justin Amash and Mick Mulvaney to supposed conservatives like Rush Limbaugh that America can afford deep cuts in the defense budget and still have a strong military; or, in the case of other libertarians, like the Students For Liberty/Ron Paul crowd, that America doesn’t need a strong military, that it would only be a tool of oppression, and that America can safely retrench and hide behind oceans and nothing will threaten it.

But all of those claims are garbage, and in this article, I’ll show you why. They might’ve made some sense during the 18th century, when any attack on America would’ve had to be a seaborne invasion or one from Mexico or Canada.

But in the 21st century, when America has vital interests around the world, when its economy is deeply interconnected to those of its allies and friends (such as Japan and South Korea), and in the era of nuclear weapons, ICBMs, ballistic missile submarines, intercontinental bombers, EMP weapons, and cyber attacks, such beliefs are utterly ridiculous. Those who indulge them live in a kum-ba-yah world.

Let us start with this timeless principle taught by Sun Tzu in his Art of War (ch. 8, v. 11):

“The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.”

We should not delude ourselves that we will never be attacked, or not for a long time, or that America is somehow invincible or unassailable, or that its military is overwhelmingly superior when this is clearly not the case.

Providing for the common defense is not only necessary, it is the Federal Government’s #1 Constitutional DUTY. Art. IV, Sec. 4 of the Constitution clearly imposes this obligation on the government; the majority of enumerated powers granted to the Congress deal with military matters; and the Preamble to the Constitution – makes it clear that one of the reasons why the federal government was create in the first place is to “provide for the common defense”. Furthermore, the military is the ONLY significant expenditure authorized by the Constitution. Federal entitlement and welfare programs are utterly unconstitutional and thus illegal.

Furthermore, the claim – often made by proponents of deep defense cuts in order to lull Americans into a false sense of security – that the US military is still overwhelmingly superior to those of other countries – is completely false (although I wish it was true). The militaries of China and Russia, as documented in detailed analysis here, have already closed the vast majority of the gaps between their and the US military’s capabilities, and are now working hard on closing the remaining few gaps. Where those gaps still exist, as in aircraft carriers, for example, China and Russia have created asymmetric advantages of their own with anti-access/area-denial weapons such as aircraft carrier killing missiles.

For a detailed analysis of China’s and Russia’s military capabilities, see here.

Another oft-made false claim which is supposed to justify deep defense cuts is that they could supposedly be done safely if the military were just granted the flexibility to decide where to make the cuts and that if such reductions are made “strategically”, in a “targeted” manner, they can supposedly be done safely.

The “studies” produced by CATO, the “Project on Defense Alternatives”, the Center for American Progress, POGO-TCS,  the NTU, and Sen. Tom Coburn (RINO-OK) are often invoked as examples and as supposed “proof” that deep defense cuts can be done safely.

But I have read and analyzed virtually all of these “studies”, and ALL of them would, if implemented (God forbid), result in the utter gutting of the US military. Why? Because the vast majority of the cuts they call for would be directed at the muscle and bone of the US military – the force structure (i.e. the size of the military), its personnel, weapons, munitions, and forward deployments.

These “studies” call for deep personnel, weapon inventory, weapon program, and force size cuts across the board to all four Services (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force) and to the already barely-adequate nuclear deterrent. They call for killing dozens of crucial modernization programs, including the Long Range Strike Bomber, the ICBM replacement program, the V-22 Osprey, the F-35, the Virginia class, and many others.

If one were to plan on how to completely gut the US military, one could not come up with a better plan than those produced by the above-mentioned leftist think-tanks (most of which, including CATO, POGO, and the CAP, are co-funded by George Soros) and by Sen. Coburn. These plans seem to be deliberately designed to gut the US military.

And NONE of these proposals or “studies” are really “strategic”, because none of them are underpinned by any strategy, only by a desire to gut the US military. Strategy is about setting priorities, funding them fully, and cutting back only on non-priority programs/objectives/activities; failure to set priorities and to fund them adequately is essentially the same thing as sequestration.

But in those “studies”, there are no priorities – like sequestration, they all call for deep, across-the-board cuts to everything the US military has and does – mostly to the muscle and bone of the military.

The first and only “priority” of these studies’ authors is to gut the US military, plain and simple.

I have refuted these ridiculous “studies” here, here, here, and here among other articles.

For his part, HumanEvents columnist Robert Maginnis wrongly claims that the US can make these cuts safely if it simply scraps a number of current missions.

But that is wrong. To make cuts on the scale of sequestration, the US military would have to jettison dozens of missions – including many crucial, necessary missions connected to America’s own national security (not just that of its allies). For example, air, naval, and ground superiority, nuclear deterrence, and missile defense.

Those who call for jettisoning many military missions and cuts on the scale of sequestration need to be made to say what exact missions they think the military should scrap and be forced to admit that doing so would mean not meeting America’s security needs and thus imperiling national security.

As then-SECDEF Robert Gates said in 2011:

“These are the kinds of scenarios we need to consider, the kinds of discussions we need to have.  If we are going to reduce the resources and the size of the U.S. military, people need to make conscious choices about what the implications are for the security of the country, as well as for the variety of military operations we have around the world if lower priority missions are scaled back or eliminated.  (…)  To shirk this discussion of risks and consequences – and the hard decisions that must follow – I would regard as managerial cowardice.

In closing, while I have spent a good  deal of time on programmatic particulars, the tough choices ahead are really about the kind of role the American people – accustomed to unquestioned military dominance for the past two decades – want their country to play in the world.”

Then there are those like Rush Limbaugh and Rand Paul who falsely claim that sequestration would be a mere cut to the growth rate of defense spending. But that is a blatant lie.

As the CBO has proven, and as I have documented here, sequestration would cut the base defense budget from $525 bn today to $469 bn in March and keep it well below today’s level (and even below $500 bn) for the next decade at least. By FY2022, the last year of the “sequestration decade”, the base defense budget would be at $493 bn – still below $500 bn and well below today’s level of $525 bn.

Meanwhile, OCO (war) spending is shrinking annually from its FY2011 peak and is set to disappear in FY2016, once all US troops leave Afghanistan.

The DOE’s defense-related (nuclear) programs and the DOD’s unspent balances from previous years are also subject to sequestration, as are all other national-security-related agencies.

In other words, sequestration would be an IMMEDIATE, REAL, DEEP, and PERMANENT cut in defense spending. It would not be a mere cut in the rate of growth. In other words, Rush, Rand, and other sequestration pooh-poohers are blatantly lying. (And the people spreading that lie are children of the Father of Lies himself.)

President Ronald Reagan articulated the need for a strong military – and the case against defense cuts – well here and here.

Let Robert Gates – a man of whom I’ve been very critical – nonetheless have the last word here:

“Since I entered government 45 years ago, I’ve shifted my views and changed my mind on a good many things as circumstances, new information, or logic dictated.  But I have yet to see evidence that would dissuade me from this fundamental belief: that America does have a special position and set of responsibilities on this planet.  I share Winston Churchill’s belief that “the price of greatness is responsibility…[and] the people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility.”  This status provides enormous benefits – for allies, partners, and others abroad to be sure, but in the final analysis the greatest beneficiaries are the American people, in terms of our security, our prosperity, and our freedom.

I know that after a decade of conflict, the American people are tired of war.  But there is no doubt in my mind that the continued strength and global reach of the American military will remain the greatest deterrent against aggression, and the most effective means of preserving peace in the 21^st century, as it was in the 20^th.”

Republicans have forgotten nothing and learned nothing

The upcoming 2014 midterm elections should be a golden opportunity for Republicans to win back the Senate (while retaining the House) and thus creating a momentum on which to capitalize as they try to retake the White House in 2016. But not if the Tea Party and the Club for Growth have anything to say about it.

In theory, everything should go Republicans’ way. The incumbent president’s party usually loses seats – sometimes big time – in midterm elections, and in 7-8 winnable states Democratic incumbents are either retiring (Harkin in IA, Rockefeller in WV, possibly Johnson in SD), running in red states (AK, LA, AR), or underfunded (NH). There are also other potential, though less feasible, pickups (e.g. OR and MT). Also, the economy shows no sign of recovering, will almost certainly not recover as long as Obama is in office, and Obama has veered far to the left. By any standard, this should be an easy election for Republicans to win.

But it won’t be, because extremist Republicans and the fringe of the conservative movement, including the Club For Growth of the Democratic Caucus, have decided to fire their arrows at good, mainstream conservatives and moderate Republicans instead of the real enemy (the Democrats).

The party and the country will both pay a heavy price if these extremists succeed.

We’ve seen this happen several times already. In 2010, when most Americans were angry at Obama and the oversized Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the Tea Party and the Club for Growth of the Democratic Caucus still managed to throw away several winnable Senate seats by supporting extremist against mainstream Republicans in states like Delaware, Nevada, and Colorado. They gave the GOP doomed-to-lose candidates: Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Ken Buck.

In 2012, winning back the Senate was going to be more difficult than in a midterm year, given that Obama was on the ballot and many Democrats rode his coattails. Still, Republicans had a chance, given that they were only 4 seats shy of a majority.

Yet, Republicans lost badly. On net, instead of winning seats, they actually lost two, growing the Democratic caucus to 55 members. This was primarily due to extremists like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, both of whom were supported by the Tea Party and both of whom threw away otherwise perfectly winnable seats. Richard Lugar, who would’ve otherwise been a shoo-in for reelection, was defeated in a primary. In Missouri, Todd Akin snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by opening his mouth about abortion and rape and saved Claire McCaskill, who would’ve otherwise been easily defeated.

Their idiocy not only cost them their races, but also cost other Republicans theirs, because their Democratic opponents reminded the voters that however nice Scott Brown, Tommy Thompson, and George Allen were, they were members of the party of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.

Those disasters should’ve been a wakeup call that Republicans must, from now on, nominate only electable – THE most electable – candidates and avoid bloody primary battles.

But it’s clear that Republicans, like the Bourbons of the Restoration Era, have forgotten nothing and learned nothing. And pseudoconservative publications like the American Spectator continue to fool Republicans into thinking that the reason Republicans lost was because they weren’t “conservative enough” and that “conservatism” and “communicating the message better” will suffice to win future elections. But that’s jut an easy, lame excuse for avoiding the unpleasant fact that the voters simply rejected you.

And so, fooled by the likes of Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Jeff Lord of AmSpec, and Richard Viguerie of ConservativeHQ, Republicans continue to delude themselves and to oppose the only candidates who stand a chance of winning future elections. And that puts their chance of winning back the Senate and retaining the House in grave peril.

In West Virginia, the Club for Growth of the Democratic Caucus opposes mainstream moderate conservative Shelley Capito, as if she were a Massachusetts liberal. In Georgia, extremists have just forced incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss – a solid across-the-board fiscal, defense, and social conservative – to retire under the threat of a primary challenge. And who’s the favorite for the GOP nomination? Rep. Paul Broun, a Todd Akin clone who believes that the evolution theory – proven scientifically over and over again – is a lie “from the pits of hell”.

In Iowa, likewise, extremists have given incumbent Rep. Steve King – who has never won anything beyond his solidly red district – the upper hand in the race against solid conservative (but not extremist) Tom Latham, who is being smeared with gossip that he’s “close to Speaker John Boehner” – a toxic name among Republicans. In Louisiana, former Rep. Jeff Landry may win the nomination, although thankfully in the Bayou State, the most electable candidate, Rep. Bill Cassidy, is also the favorite to win the nomination.

So in at least four states, extremists are already at work to deny the nomination to the most electable candidates, even though all of them are mainstream conservatives and haven’t done anything egregious to deserve a primary challenge. This is more than enough to deny the GOP a Senate majority for the third time in a row. In the worst case, the GOP could lose seats again.

On a positive note, popular former SD Gov. Mike Rounds has an at least 50% chance of winning in his state – whether Tim Johnson runs for reelection or not – and in Arkansas, Republicans have a deep bench, although it remains to be seen if the strongest GOP candidate, Rep. Tom Cotton, runs for the Senate here. If he does, he’ll likely win. And in Alaska, disastrous 2010 candidate Joe Miller can’t find enough supporters even in his own party, so the GOP should defeat Mark Begich (D-AK), especially if he fails to block the move of a fighter wing out of Eielson AFB.

Republicans also have a pickup opportunity in NH, because incumbent Sen. Jeanne Shaheen has raised only a pathetic $300,000 for reelection. A well-funded Republican challenger who doesn’t have to undergo a bloodying primary battle would be a strong candidate.

But Republicans can win the Senate back only if everything goes their way. That means no protracted, bloodying, divisive primary battles (they only help Democrats) and no more unelectable, fringe candidates.

No more Sharron Angles. No more Christine O’Donnells. No more Ken Bucks. No more Todd Akins. No more Richard Mourdocks. No more Paul Brouns. No more Steve Kings.

Republicans can win the Senate back in 2014 – but ONLY if they keep the Tea Party and the Club for Growth of the Democratic Caucus at bay.

Folks, let’s focus on the REAL enemy: the Democrats.

Why Romney REALLY lost, and how to win in the future

There is a dangerous myth circulating around the Net that Mitt Romney lost because he was not “conservative enough”, that millions of Republican voters supposedly stayed home on Election Day, and that the way to win future elections is to nominate “the most conservative candidate”. Any GOP problems with women, youngsters, and minorities are being explained away by claiming that “better communication of conservative principles” will solve everything.

But all of these claims are wrong. In this article, I will show you why Mitt Romney really lost the election, and how Republicans can win future elections.

As to the first issue: while many factors contributed to Romney’s loss, there are three that truly cost him the election:

1)      He was running against an incumbent president who also happened to be the media’s darling and faced no serious primary challenger. Incumbent presidents usually win reelection; they lose only if they face serious primary or third-party challengers or if a total disaster befalls the nation. Ann Coulter has nicely summed up the five rare cases that this has happened in the last 124 (!) years

• In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt fought a bloody primary against President Taft, and after losing the primary, mounted a third-party challenge against him, thus costing Republicans the election and delivering the White House to Woodrow Wilson.
• In 1932, Hoover faced serious primary challengers such as former President Coolidge, and the nation was 3 years into the Great Depression.
• In 1976, President Ford couldn’t defeat Ronald Reagan in the primaries, barely defeated him by a squeaker on the convention floor, and narrowly lost against Jimmy Carter just 2 years after Watergate, 1 year after America’s defeat in Vietnam, and into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
• In 1980, Jimmy Carter was badly bloodied and battered by Ted Kennedy (who ran as “the true liberal”) in the primaries, losing primaries in states such as California, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York, and faced a third-party opponent, John Anderson, who siphoned votes away from him knowing full well he was helping Reagan.
• In 1992, President Bush, after breaking his “no new taxes” pledge, faced a formidable primary challenger, Pat Buchanan, and a third party opponent, Ross Perot, who won 19% of the popular vote and siphoned enough votes away from him to deliver the White House to Bill Clinton. (Republicans take note: disunited parties don’t succeed.)

2)      Romney had to expend a lot of time and resources defeating unserious primary challengers, all of whom eventually succumbed, none of whom had any business running for President – solely because the GOP base thought that Obama’s extremism and temporary troubles left them free to follow their hearts instead of their brains.

3)      Like other Republicans, and the GOP as a whole, Romney was very unpopular with Hispanics (whom he lost 27-71), young people, and the ladies (whom he lost 44-55).

That last point is also the key to understanding what Republicans need to do to win in future elections. Let’s look at who voted for or against Romney.

Despite the myth that millions of conservatives stayed home, Romney got the votes of 82% of conservatives and 1 million more votes overall than John McCain in 2008. Romney won easily among reliably conservative voters: seniors, members of the military, veterans,  regular churchgoers, protestants, born-again Christians, and so forth. (Catholics were almost evenly split, 50-48 in Obama’s favor, and among them, likelihood to vote Republican also correlates with how frequent they go to church.) Geographically, Romney won all of the South – except the moderate states of Florida and Virginia – quite easily, and he retook Indiana and North Carolina. He won the middle class and wealthy voters, married men and women, as well as those with high school, “some college education”, or a college degree.

The voters who really rejected Romney were the demographics that have traditionally held all Republicans – not just Romney – in low regard: blacks, Asians, Hispanics, women, and young people; poor people; unmarried people; high school dropouts and postgraduate degree holders; and people between 30 and 39 years of age.

These demographics have never been friendly towards Republicans (except in 2004, when Bush made a partially successful effort to woo them), so the problem is much larger than Romney. It’s the entire GOP’s problem.

The problem for Republicans is that these demographic groups are the ones that are growing in size, while traditional Republican demographics – seniors, whites, regular churchgoers – are declining. Thus, unless the GOP makes a serious and successful outreach to those demographics which aren’t currently friendly to the GOP, it will become a permanent minority party.

Some claim that conservatism is enough to win again. It’s not. Ronald Reagan won a landslide in 1980, but in that year, the electorate was almost 90% white. In 2012, it was just 72% white and is on course to become “majority minority” by the 2040s.

Mitt Romney won 59% of the white vote last year – more than Ronald Reagan in 1980 (56%). The problem is that this just isn’t enough any longer. Republicans thus must reach out to minorities, youngsters, and the ladies. The sooner, the better.

So how to win future elections? How to reach out to those groups?

Republicans need to face up to the unpleasant fact that – as so many have already observed – their extremist stance on immigration completely disqualifies them with Hispanics (and with most Americans of all races), and that this cost Republicans Colorado, Nevada, and Florida. True, immigration was not the absolutely #1 issue for Hispanics (the economy was), but it was nonetheless a very important issue for them, and it weighed heavily in their voting decisions.

Polling shows that the vast majority of Hispanics (and Americans in general), including a sizeable minority of Republicans, supports legalization of illegal immigrants. Yet, most Republicans not only reject it, they talk about immigration in terms that are very offensive to Hispanics (even Hispanic US citizens), such as “illegal alien” and “self-deportation”.

Republicans also need to make peace with the ladies and with young voters, the majority of whom are fiscally conservative but socially liberal and seldom go to church. That means at least modulating the GOP’s stance on social issues, especially gay marriage which the majority of Americans now supports. It also means denying Republican nominations for all offices to the likes of Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Paul Broun, and Steve King.

But, as with immigration, the problem isn’t just Republicans’ extremist stance on these issues – it’s also the way they express it. Todd Akin’s and Richard Mourdock’s comments like “awww, if you get pregnant from rape, don’t worry, because pregnancy from rape is a gift from God!” are just the tip of the iceberg.

Most women, most youngsters, and most Americans in general are pro-gay-marriage and pro-choice, and Republicans will need to at least soften their stance and explain how can they support Limited Government on fiscal issues but Big Government on social issues. Another way to solve this problem is to devolve these divisive issues to state governments (federalism). After all, they’re just a few among the million of issues reserved by the 10^th Amendment to state governments.

Those reforms will, like any bold reforms, be vehemently opposed by the fringe of the party. But they must be carried out if the GOP is to survive, let alone to win elections.

If they are implemented, Republicans can win back more than enough states to win 270 EC votes and create a new, durable Republican majority, which will consist of voters from all walks of life and of all races, religions, and social groups who support low taxes, low spending, limited Constitutional government, and a strong national defense, even though they will disagree on social issues.

If Republicans make peace with Hispanics, women, and youngsters, they can and should target the following states: Florida (29), OH (18), VA (13), CO (9), and possibly even PA (20). This, even without PA, will give them 275 EC votes in addition to the 206 votes won by Romney last year.

Rebuttal of de Rugy’s and Winslow Wheeler’s blatant lies about defense spending

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. – George Orwell

Anti-defense organizations such as POGO and the CDI (both of whom employ professional blowhard and liar Winslow Wheeler) routinely and falsely claim that the US spends almost $1 trillion per year on “defense” or the military. Late last year, libertarian propagandist Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at GMU joined them in propagating this blatant lie, uncritically repeating Winslow Wheeler’s false $930 bn figure and presenting it in a table.

But they are lying. How?

Firstly, they falsely claim that Budget Category #050 (“National Defense” in OMB/CBO classification) contained $676 bn in FY2012. But actual data from the OMB says it was $670 bn, and even that is overestimated, because the entire US military budget for FY2012 (the base budget plus OCO spending plus spending on the Energy Department’s nat-sec programs) was $633 bn, not $670 bn or $676 bn, in FY2012. (In FY2013, the maximum authorized amount, per the FY2013 NDAA, is $613 bn.)

Secondly, de Rugy and Wheeler falsely claim various larger and smaller budgetary items as being “defense spending” or “military spending”, even though the vast majority of them have no military nature and have nothing whatsoever to do with defense (though many of them are loosely related to the much broader mission of “national security”, the most important and basic function of the federal government).

In other words, de Rugy and Wheeler dishonestly count many budgetary items as “defense spending” in order to deliberately exaggerate its scale and thus to mislead the public.

These items are: the Department of Veterans’ Affairs budget ($124 bn), the “international affairs budget” ($61 bn), the DHS’s budget ($46 bn), and the DOD’s healthcare programs ($21 bn). They falsely and dishonestly claim that 100% of all of these items counts as “defense spending” and add it to the military budget to arrive at a figure of $928 bn for FY2012.

Needless to say, their claims are utterly false.

Let’s review each of these items and see whether they really count as “defense spending” or “military spending”, which properly defined means  spending on the US military itself as an institution – specifically, to pay, feed, clothe, train, heal, and house the members of the US military and to provide them with the resources (including, but not solely, weapons) with which to defend the nation and carry out all their missions, and the bases where they live, work, and train.

Let’s see if the budget items which Wheeler and de Rugy dishonestly claimed as “defense spending” really count as such:

• The Department of Veterans Affairs ($124 bn): This agency cares for past members of the military – those who no longer serve. It provides them with care, including medical care. It exercises no military functions whatsoever and has nothing whatsoever with the mission of defending America. Thus, it does not count as “military” or “defense” spending.
• The Department of Homeland Security ($46 bn): This civilian agency, while having the mission of protecting the US, is a purely civilian and purely domestic agency. It does not prepare anyone for war and does not carry out any military operations. Its only similarly with the DOD is that it shares its broader mission of protecting America and Americans from harm… and that’s where the similarities end. It has nothing whatsoever to do with America’s military defense or the US military, save for US Coast Guard, a $5 bn portion of the DHS’s $46 bn annual budget.
• The international affairs budget ($61 bn): Again, it has nothing to do with the US military or with defending America. In fact, it doesn’t have anything to do with martial issues at all, save for its small part which finances the training and equipping of certain foreign militaries (the majority of this goes to just two countries: Israel and Egypt). The vast majority of this $61 bn pot of money, however, is civilian in nature: humanitarian aid, the UN’s Millenium Challenge, fighting AIDS, US embassies and consulates, consular services, etc. Yet, de Rugy, Wheeler, POGO, and CDI falsely claim all $124 bn of this money as “defense spending”, which is a blatant lie.
• The DOD’s healthcare programs ($21 bn): as this is a DOD program and as it pays for the healthcare of current members of the US military, this may be legitimately claimed as military spending. However, this small, $21 bn pot of money hardly changes anything in the equation.

So the vast majority of what de Rugy, Wheeler, POGO, and CDI claim as “defense” or “military spending” isn’t “defense/military spending” at all. It’s purely civilian spending and has nothing whatsoever to do with the US military and the mission of defending America; foreign aid doesn’t even have anything to with the much broader mission of national security or protecting the country, as its only purpose is for the transfer of wealth from rich to poor countries under utopian globalist schemes.

Adding the DOD’s healthcare program ($21 bn) and the Coast Guard ($5 bn) to the joint DOD-DOE military budget for FY2012 ($633 bn per the FY2012 NDAA) brings the total to $659 bn, almost $300 bn below the $928 bn number that de Rugy and Wheeler falsely  claimed and deliberately use to mislead the public.

To be clear: whatever its size is, the defense budget – and the entire rest of the federal budget – should be examined for potential savings and efficiencies – as it has already been several times since 2009. Since there is broad political agreement that such examination for potential efficiencies should be made, there is no reason to wildly exaggerate the size of the defense budget.

But de Rugy (who isn’t even an American), Wheeler, POGO, and CDI don’t care about that. They’re not interested in the truth, in careful defense savings, in the country’s security, or in the nation’s fiscal health. All they care about is gutting the US military – POGO and the CDI were founded for that very purpose, and POGO is today generously co-financed by George Soros through his Open Society Institute.

They and other enemies of America’s defense must be prevented from achieving their goal. America’s and the world’s security depends on it. And to do that, we defense conservatives must first present the public with the facts and counter de Rugy’s and Wheeler’s blatant lies. Intellectual disarmament always precedes actual disarmament.

Free trade is for dupes and idiots, Part 2

In his SOTU speech, Barack Obama announced that his Administration is (unconstitutionally and thus illegally) negotiating trade agreements with the EU and countries of the Pacific Rim. Free trade proponents – including Iain Murray of the pseudoconservative American Spectator – applauded him, as they are ideologically aligned with him. In defense of their (and his) free trade agenda, they have regurgitated their standard litany of lies about trade.

Murray falsely claims that:

“The benefits of free trade are many, and accepted by virtually all economists. They include reductions in the cost of living, greater choice and increased quality of goods, higher incomes on both sides, economic growth and, perhaps most important in an increasingly corporatist America, a reduction in the effectiveness of lobbying. Protectionism provides the reverse in all of these cases, and would be just as foolish now as when the Smoot-Hawley law deepened the Depression. (…)

However, that last benefit in the list I just provided has not escaped the eye of special interests. Indeed, most of the free trade agreements which America has negotiated in recent years have been heavily influenced by lobbyists, not only from industry, but also from the environmental and labor organizations. They have consistently insisted on inserting measures into the agreements that maintain protections for their interests and reduce the scope for the full benefits from free trade.”

All of his claims are blatant lies.

There are NO benefits from free trade. None whatsoever. It is protectionism that brings about the benefits he claims, not free trade.

How do we know it? From the facts – from the results of real life, not theoretical theses put forward by Murray and others living in their academic ivory towers.

Increased quality of goods? Don’t make me laugh. The goods that the US imports from China and other “developing” countries are of abysmally low quality, made from weak materials in a poor fashion, breaking down after little time of use, and many of them – including toys and food – are poisoned with lead (toys) or melamine (food). The problem is so grave that one American mother raised that question in a 2007 GOP presidential debate. Virtually anyone who has bought anything made in China will attest to the poor quality of Chinese goods.

Reductions in the cost of living? Rising incomes on both sides? Is that a joke? Since the ratification of the first “free trade” deals in the 1990s, the real wages and real income of low-income and middle-class workers has remained flat in inflation-adjusted dollars. The only Americans who have seen their incomes rise since then have been the wealthy – the CEOs of large corporations who are happy to ship jobs overseas (mostly to China).

Greater choice? China’s price-dumping, flooding of the US with extremely low quality goods, and refusal to implement any environmental or labor standards has undercut and undermined American companies and to the flooding of store shelves with Chinese products, leaving Americans with little choice other than these low-quality products.

Reduction in the effectiveness of lobbyists? Don’t make me laugh. It was precisely lobbyists – and no one else – who wanted and secured the passage of all free trade deals ratified by the US, from the WTO to the GATT to NAFTA, to Most Favored Nation status for China, to the disastrous KORUS FTA.

American workers and voters did not want these disastrous free trade deals. Indeed, they vehemently protested against them and urged their Congressmen and Senators to vote against them (especially against the KORUS FTA).

It was the greedy CEOs of large multinational corporations and their lobbyists on Capitol Hill who campaigned for and secured the passage of these disastrous (for America) deals.

Economic growth? That’s the most idiotic claim Murray has made. Free trade has done nothing but stymie US economic growth. Historically, the US economy has grown fastest when operating under protectionist (economically nationalist) policies: protective tariffs.

Indeed, this is what all history – of all countries – shows. It proves that protectionism is what brings about fast economic growth, while “free trade” (i.e. being a dupe who borrows money to buy foreign products and destroys his own industry) leads to economic stagnation.

Protectionism (economic nationalism) is the trade policy of ascendant economic powers; free trade, the policy of descending, declining ones.

EVERY country which ever became an economic power became one by protecting and nurturing its industrial base – England under the Acts of Navigation, France under Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Napoleon Bonaparte, Britain until the mid-19^th century, Prussia under the Customs Union (1834-1871), unified Germany under Bismarck and his successors, the US from 1861 to the 1960s, postwar Japan, China today.

NO country ever became an economic power by indulging in free trade, which is only for dupes and idiots and leads to economic disaster.

The US became the world’s economic superpower – indeed, was once the economic envy of the world – because from 1861 until at least the 1960s it protected and nurtured its industry with tariffs that effectively barred most foreign products from the US and protected its industrial base while not hampering competition between domestic producers in any way (and antitrust legislation ensured that such competition would stay alive in the US).

Thus, the US became a world producer of everything, an economically fully self-sufficient country, supplying not just its large population but the entire world with all sorts of products, from alloys, to cars, to planes, to everything else. By the 1940s and the early 1950s, it accounted for 50% of the world’s industrial production, partially due to the damage WW2 inflicted on Europe but partially due to the protection of the American industry (which was indispensable in winning that war by producing weapons for the US and its allies).

This was because, from its founding until at least the 1960s, the US followed the preceipts of the Founding Fathers, especially Alexander Hamilton: Trade surpluses are preferrable to trade deficits. It does matter where things are produced. There is no free lunch. Manufacturing, not finance, is the nation’s economic muscle.

But today, the US hardly manufactures anything and has become dependent on foreign countries – especially China – on all sorts of products, including the necessities of life.

“Free trade” has been a total disaster for the US. Since 2000 alone, thanks to free-trade policies, over 55,000 factories across the country have been closed and relocated overseas, mainly to China, and 6 million good, well-paying manufacturing jobs have been shipped – mostly to China. The only reward is the dubious privilege of buying low-quality Chinese goods.

Before NAFTA’s ratification, the US had an annual trade surplus with Mexico; since 1993, however, it has had a trade deficit with that country every year and the 2012 trade deficit was the largest between the two in history. After ratification of the KORUS FTA, America’s trade deficit with South Korea jumped threefold in April 2012 alone. Our trade deficit with Japan is the largest ever between us.

America’s trade deficit with China is the largest ever between any two countries in human history: $300 bn in 2012.

Not just between the US and China, but the largest between any two countries on God’s green Earth in all recorded human history!

And yes, trade deficits do matter. A lot. They decrease the country’s GDP while increasing the GDP of the country you’re buying from. This is not surprising to anyone who knows economics 101: to be able to buy something, you have to earn the money to buy it – or borrow it. If you borrow money, you’re driving yourself deeper into debt. If you buy it with the money you’re already have, you’re transferring your income to the other guy. He earns money and you lose it.

If he sells you more than he buys from you, he makes more money at YOUR expense than YOU do at his expense. In other words, on net, he earns money at YOUR expense: he takes money from you, while you lose money.

Producing goods creates jobs (all goods have to be made by someone). If you buy goods from a foreign country, you’re creating jobs in THAT country rather than yours, and increasing the income of THAT country rather than yours, while you lose money and jobs (or, at minimum, the opportunity to create jobs at home).

That country gains and you lose.

If you buy more from abroad than you export, you’ll have to borrow money to buy those things, thus driving yourself deeper and deeper into debt.

Those “economists” who support free trade clearly don’t even know Economics 101, or the Basic Facts of Life 101.

Free trade has also been a political disaster for Republicans. They’ve been complicit in its making, indeed often leading the campaign for it, and helped destroy most of American industry. Might the wiping out of most factories in the Midwest and the Northeast have had anything to do with Republicans inability to win those states and their foolish advocacy of free trade?

Illinois and Michigan haven’t voted Republican since 1984; Pennsylvania, not since 1988; Ohio, not since 2004.

By contrast, from 1860 to 1924, Republicans – then known as The Party of Protection – put 12 presidents only in the White House. The Democrats put only 2.

In short, the claims of Iain Murray and other free traders – none of whom have ever built a great nation – are blatant lies.