The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. … This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector. — Plato, The Republic
The Congress shall have Power to … declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water. … — the U.S. Constitution
The New York Times editorial board marches on with its “Overmatched” series. Today’s installment: “The Pentagon’s Gilded Fortress.”
An excerpt:
In 2011, the Army decided to get its soldiers new pistols. The odyssey that followed included a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing and a protracted battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun makers. The Pentagon won’t complete delivery until 2027 at the earliest. The Army could have raised an infantryman from birth to within two years of enlistment age in the time it will have taken to get him a new handgun.
Unsurprisingly, our elected representatives are part of the problem:
As the House and Senate work toward the country’s first trillion-dollar defense budget, over $52 billion is for things members of Congress added, unbidden, to the Pentagon’s wish list, according to the independent budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Jaysis. Planes that can’t fly. $13 billion sitting ducks. Millions for retrofitting Vietnam-era helicopters to carry and launch drones. For Ike’s fabled Military-Industrial Complex it’s like robbing the same bank, over and over and over again, because you have a guy on the inside. You don’t even need to bring that pistol you can’t seem to acquire for some mysterious reason.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, etc.
The roving Eye of Mordor has fallen upon Sandia National Labs. And where the Eye goes, the Sword shall follow.
The deets remain elusive. But the gist of it is that Sandia plans “to reduce its workforce” by as many as 510 employees as part of a “restructuring effort aimed at cost reduction,” which may include a “voluntary separation program” and a hiring freeze.
This is PR-speak for “budget cuts, buyouts, and layoffs.”
One to three percent of the staff is not a huge bloodletting, unless you happen to be one of the 510 and have a couple kids in university, a parent in a nursing home, and the usual credit-card debt and home/auto/college loans outstanding.
Nevertheless, you may well ask, how is it that the Military-Industrial Complex is reduced to counting its pennies in these dark days?
Well, it seems as though the Military portion of the Complex is in tip-top shape. No shortage of comfy chairs, caviar, and Champagne in the Boom-Boom Room.
But the Industrial aspect? Well … it suffers from elevated levels of solar, wind, and geothermal technologies that don’t kill foreigners, DEI, or The Woke, and thus are not covered by MAGA Cross-Red Shield. So those have to come off, stat. And with a scimitar, not a scalpel.
Anesthesia, you ask? Ho, ho. Suck it up, Buttercup. Drugs are for Closers. And you posie-sniffing Poindexters wonder why you weren’t invited to the King’s Birthday Parade. You should’ve grabbed a chair in the Boom-Boom Room before the music stopped.
Hire a clown, expect a circus.
Well. Seems the Israelis went and stole some of the pomp and circumstance from Der Trumpenführer’s little parade.
Saturday’s expensive, theatrical pud-pulling in DeeCee will soon be forgotten, even by fanboys, late-show wiseguys, and meme-makers. But people will be talking about what Israel just did to Iran for the better part of quite some time.
Discussing the differences between preemptive strikes and preventative war in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols likened the Israeli decapitation of the Iranian military’s chain of command to Michael Corleone’s settling of the family business near the end of “The Godfather.”
But Trump is straight out of Jimmy Breslin’s “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” A guy who, like Kid Sally Palumbo, couldn’t even promote a bicycle race worth a damn.
Remember the Tour de Trump? Yeah, neither does anyone else. That little Tour de France thing he promised to topple is still ticking along nicely, though.
He kept his big bazoo shut for hours after the Israeli strikes on Iran — yeah, I know, Fatso keeping it buttoned sounds like fake news to me, too — and when he finally got medicated enough to fart out a few syllables they were all about “deals,” as if the existential Israeli-Iranian saber dance on the razor’s edge of Armageddon were just another real-estate pitch.
You want a bomb shelter with that casino? There will be a small additional charge.
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