Slopping the Hogs

How could so many petty scandals and corrupt practices occur under the noses of President Bush and his administration? Actually, there are several simple explanations.

Maintenance is neglected at Walter Reed Army Hospital; outpatient treatment there and in other facilities is a scandal; classifying of disabilities among the wounded is late and adversarial; in Iraq, Humvies continue to be fielded with inadequate armor; national guard and reserve forces are not adequately supplied, VA hospitals are not prepared to handle the problems of continuing care casualties; and on and on. What’s going on?

First, one that I and many others have been yelping about for years, divided government works. The Democrats are able to investigate what the unified Republicans have been able to paper over during the entire period of the Iraq War. The administration and its lackeys on the Hill routinely tabled investigations of such scandals until this year.

Second – related to the first – the media now has access to a branch of government that is ready to hear the truth about the war and its consequences and is ready to call the administration to account at committee hearings. These hearings, broadcast into the homes of Americans by C-Span and the cable news networks make it impossible for the administration to deny or reject the obvious as it has for the past four years.

Okay, the scandals are there; why? As always, it’s about the money. The president and his sycophants are in a war that has gotten completely beyond their ability to control. The cost in blood and treasure is way beyond their wildest projections and instead of being honest with the congress and the voters, they’ve gone to great lengths to fight to the last dime of veterans benefits, military health care funds, and equipment for our ground troops in order to hide the true costs of the war until they can get out of town.

They must continue to slop the military industrial pigs and can’t cut high tech programs in which they wallow and that have little to do with the Iraq. Thus, fighter planes designed to control the skies in a war against a super power opponent two decades hence cannot be slowed. The same goes for other high tech weapons systems; we simply can’t cut them or even slow them as the military industrial complex might turn on its nominal masters.

That military experts opine that the most likely conflicts in the near and mid-term are likely to be similar to those being waged today in Afghanistan and Iraq means little when it comes to the suppliers of high tech – and very high cost - systems be they land, sea, air or space based. Arming ground troops and their support systems is costly and it puts far too little in the pockets of those becoming rich designing futuristic systems for wars generations down the road. Rifles, bullets, body armor, medical care, field rations and land troops themselves are expensive and put little lucre in appropriate larders.

Thus to assure that the fattest pigs continue to be slopped, cuts must be made from the least politically powerful of the defense accounts, the protection and long term care of those who actually do the fighting. Mold on the walls of out patient rooms at Walter Reid would have remained until the transfer payments from poor to the corporations supplying the high tech equipment not now in use in Iran was actually in the appropriate accounts. So we must satisfy the poor troops and ourselves with symbolic yellow stick on ribbons on our SUVs until some later date when the magnitude of the full bill for Iraq becomes obvious – some time after January 20, 2009 when Bush takes up brush cutting in earnest.

Until the new president takes office, we will also have to be satisfied with the canning of a few scapegoats so that we can continue to shovel defense dollars to the fat cats who buy the television ads proclaiming that they love the troops – usually shown operating high tech devices.

Why the Republicans rail against transfer payments is beyond me. Between tax cuts for the rich, subsidies for corporate farmers and carving the defense budget out of our wounded and dead, I just don’t get their beef - or ham. Oh, you may be sure that these petty scandals will be solved, but be further assured the funds will come from the hides of some other poor constituency rather than from the rich and high tech defense sectors.

Blog on! Only 688 more days until Inauguration Day.

Wild Bill