SmartRemarks

Just another quickie, passing along some cheery news that left my jaw hanging open. In a shocking reversal of standard bipartisan practice, Secretary of Defense Gates actually wants to scrap some overpriced, unneeded weapons systems. Talk about a move that’s long overdue!

From WaPo (complete with all of Dana Milbank’s melodramatic-yet-frivolous stylings):

“We will end production of the F-22 fighter,” Gates announced matter-of-factly in the hushed Pentagon briefing room yesterday, dispatching Lockheed Martin’s $140-million-a-pop aircraft without even a hint of regret. “For me,” he added, “it was not a close call.”

…But the understated delivery obscured the boldness of what Gates was attempting: Calmly and methodically, he posed a direct challenge to the military-industrial complex.

Boeing’s Future Combat Systems fighting vehicles — kaboom!

Lockheed’s multiple-kill vehicle: killed.

Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics’ DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer with Raytheon electronics? Gates sunk their battleship.

The Lockheed VH-71 presidential helicopter and Boeing’s C-17 cargo plane? SecDef shot them down, too.

He even wants to cut back on the use of private contractors and return to a focus on civil-service professionals!

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There’s been a lot of interesting political commentary going on this past week (just check out the industrious writers on my blogroll), but I admit that I haven’t felt inspired to chime in on it. Sometimes the weight of public affairs just seems overwhelming, and it helps to step back and focus on personal matters. However, there is one political meme that keeps recurring lately, in the public discourse and thus, also, in the back of my mind. It’s ubiquitous in the establishment press and on the internet; it came up repeatedly last week in Obama’s second press conference, and again today on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. And it’s certainly prominent in Congress.

Here’s the meme:  that Obama’s budget is too ambitious, since it dramatically increases the national debt (by what the CBO projects to be $9.3 trillion over ten years, as has been widely reported). That we’re all “fiscal conservatives” who naturally agree that deficit spending is A Bad Thing, and therefore that Congress clearly needs to scale spending back from what Obama has proposed.

There’s a simple question going unasked here:  why? Nothing about this meme is as self-evident as those who echo it seem to assume. 

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President Obama has the useful political skill of being a chameleon of sorts, looking different depending on context and, especially, the eye of the beholder. By and large this has worked for him; he and his programs are more popular now than when he was elected. All the same, there’s been a great deal of media attention lately to a backlash of sorts against the Obama administration. Most of it comes from the usual suspects, fire-breathers like Rush Limbaugh and his CPAC cohorts. They charge that Obama is doing exactly what he promised (horrors!) and it’s even worse than they expected, and isn’t it terrible how this rush toward Euro-style socialism will be the ruin of this country? We can easily enough dismiss these types as right-wingers who never supported him and never would under any circumstances, and who are too busy right now presiding over the self-destruction of the Republican party to do any great harm.

Some of the criticism is a little more temperate, though… and comes from factions of the right who did at least conditionally support Obama. They’re now arguing that he isn’t what they took him to be, since they thought he was A Moderate Like Them, when in fact he’s A Radical Ideologue. The most prominent invocation of this argument recently showed up in a piece by David Brooks, one of the New York Times‘ pet conservative columnists. He starts by drawing conclusions pretty much the diametrical opposite of my own (and most other analysts’) about Obama’s proposed budget, and veers off wildly from there: Read the rest of this entry »

Just going from the press coverage, of course. I haven’t read the actual FY 2010 federal budget the administration presented to Congress. (Have you ever tried to read a federal budget? Even in outline form, they’re large. And arcane. The legislators themselves don’t usually bother. They have staff lobbyists for that sort of thing…)

Anyway, I’m going to tackle this one in bullet-point format, starting with the largest category:

Good Things About Obama’s Budget

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