I basically switch around to look at the different pretty colors. I still self-identify as a Democrat, but I don't like what I see in terms of lack of ethics and lack of creativity and imagination.

This fear of being portrayed weak on defense-- if that's what this is-- is preventing any sane discussion about a reckless and bloated defense budget. We don't have a strong defense, we have an expensive defense. And if we back out a bit and look at the total national security picture, and not just our military, we see that we have to borrow money from central banks abroad every single year to foot the bill for our bloated military expenditures. The Chinese have already bankrolled our defense to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. They can dump their vast reserves of dollars on the market at any time and cause a catastrophe in our financial markets. Or, they can use their dollars to snap up critical US assets (they've already made a play at a major oil company, Unocal... we stymied that effort, but it's only a matter of time before they make another play)... or they can use their $1 trillion in foreign currency reserves to buy armaments for their own military. How does borrowing money from China to foot the bill for weapons fit into a sane national security policy, when you have to believe that China would be our most likely adversary in any war that would require the fancy weaponry that the borrowed money is buying?

And like I mention before-- we spend $470 billion for our military ($700 billion if you count the wars ), and when we determine that we need a mere 20,000 extra troops on top of a modest 140,000 or so in Iraq, we don't even have them at hand! And it's not just troops that we have less and less of-- each generation of fighter planes, we get a fraction of the number of planes as the previous generation, because they cost 4 times as much as the previous generation. And of course in the wars we are fighting, where the opponent doesn't have any air force at all, our super-expensive fighters are overkill to say the least-- $100 million targets that can be taken down by a lucky shot by an opponent's small arms fire.

Comments?

And this explains this: Or exactly how?  Don't these seem sort of contradictory even to you?