Compared to Mitt Romney, Nixon may well have been a defense spending dove.
Last week, we showed you how far to the right the Republican Party has drifted by noting that in its 1956 platform, the party called for expanding unions rights, gender equality, investing in science, and other now-banished ideas among right wing thinkers.
Here’s another area where the party has in several decades drifted dangerously to the right.
At the party’s 1972 convention, Republican President Richard Nixon — certainly no dove by any stretch of the imagination — took to the podium and boasted of cutting defense spending:
NIXON:Ai??Let’s look at the record on defense expenditures. We have cut spending in our Administration. It now takes the lowest percentage of our national product in 20 years. We should not spend more on defense than we need. But we must never spend less than we need.
Watch Nixon boast of reducing defense expenditures (the relevant section is at 33:06):
Rather than increasing the Pentagon’s budget, what we really need to do is REDUCE it. We should slash the military budget by one-third each year until we have a reasonable instead of bloated military, a military able to defend us but unable to play “bully” around the world. Right now we are in a state of perpetual war because our war-making machine needs war to justify its existence and occupy its time, while military industries fatten up off government contracts for unnecessary technology, including drones.
Why are we at war? Certainly not for humanitarian goals, whatever rhetoric we spout, or we would have been in Darfur or we would be in the Congo and Guatemala and Colombia. Oh, wait our soldiers ARE there, doing “special ops” that have nothing to do with the humanitarian crises in these spots. We are selling arms to regimes committing genocide in Syria and Bahrain. We wage war because it profits the military-industrial complex as Bob Dylan pointed out during the Vietnam War. We wage war specifically in the Middle East to prevent cessation of oil flow to our shores. We wage war and we stir up wars because peace gives intelligence operatives no job security. Our sons and daughters die because we wage war. Our sons and daughters become murderers of unarmed civilians and revel in their kills because we wage war. Our sons and daughters come home traumatized and impaired from the horrors they witness because we wage war. Some wars are necessary, such as World War II, because America was, indeed, attacked. 9/11 was an attack but not one perpetrated by a country or a people but by a secret organization, who was not so much a secret to our C.I.A. and our military intelligence echelon. Who benefitted from the 9/11 attack? Certainly not Al Queda since they became the hunted and had to hide even from a majority of Islamic nations which condemned their attack. But it provided an excuse for our military to wage war and for our government to institute extraordinary repressions of Americans’ civil rights through the Patriot Act. It allowed President Bush to assume executive powers not accorded to his office by the Constitution. Nor has President Obama surrendered those powers since he assumed office or tried to rescind the Patriot Act that locks down American freedoms we used to cherish. The reason Osama bin Laden was executed and not arrested and put on trial was to prevent him from revealing knowledge dangerous to others who were instrumental behind 9/11. Oddly enough, bin Laden’s gruesome death, along with all the other civilians in his hideaway, accomplished what bin Laden most desired: Islamic anger against the United States and more willingness to use terrorizing tactics.
War is never a solution, whether it is against terrorists or against drugs. War creates problems. World War I set the stage for World War II. These more recent wars have created hatreds that will be difficult, maybe impossible, to counter.
So, the best approach to reducing the deficit is to cut the Pentagon budget.
pet·ti·fog·ging
/ˈpetēˌfôgiNG/
Adjective
Petty; trivial.
(of a person) Placing undue emphasis on petty details.
Synonyms
petty