by David Stockman
Yet what this insensible pick also shows, if any more proof is needed, is that Donald Trump is a clueless, lightweight political demagogue who has no intention of bringing the Empire Home. Nor does he have the remotest chance of making the American economy great again. That’s because if you don’t dismantle the war machine and slash the hideously bloated national security budget by upwards of $500 billion per year, the already debt-saturated US economy is going to be KO’d by an exploding public debt.
https://original.antiwar.com/David_Stockman/2024/11/14/trumps-hegseth-caper-and-the-delusion-of-peace-through-strength
Well, you can say this much about the Donald’s off-the-wall pick of Fox’s weekend news commentator, Pete Hegseth, for Secretary of Defense: At least it wasn’t a hard-core neocon like House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala), Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) or the horrid Senator Tom Cotten of Arkansas. Better a cheerleader for patriotism and valorization of the military than war-mongering interventionists like those three blemishes on the Republican brand.
Well, maybe. Yet what this insensible pick also shows, if any more proof is needed, is that Donald Trump is a clueless, lightweight political demagogue who has no intention of bringing the Empire Home. Nor does he have the remotest chance of making the American economy great again. That’s because if you don’t dismantle the war machine and slash the hideously bloated national security budget by upwards of $500 billion per year, the already debt-saturated US economy is going to be KO’d by an exploding public debt.
For want of doubt, however, here is the Donald’s rationale for selecting a guy to run the $1 trillion/2.9 million employee Pentagon who has never managed anything bigger than a household of three successive wives and the accumulation of seven kids:
“Nobody fights harder for the Troops, and Pete will be a courageous and patriotic champion of our ‘Peace through Strength’ policy… Pete has spent his entire life as a Warrior for the Troops, and for the Country… With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice – Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.
What unmitigated breast-beating rubbish!
For crying out loud, the last thing America needs is another Warrior for the Troops. Instead, what it really needs is a Fearless Slayer of the sacred cows and obese pigs of the military/industrial complex who gorge themselves at the Pentagon’s trough.
Likewise, the pointless, costly Forever Wars stem from too much of the false “strength” of a globe-spanning War Machine that thrives upon inventing enemies, exaggerating threats to national security and provoking conflicts. We are referring, for instance, to the Washington-funded and orchestrated coup in Ukraine during February 2014 that deposed a duly-elected, Russia-friendly President and fostered the hellacious civil war now raging in Ukraine.
The fact is, the very slogan “peace through strength” is a vestigial relic of the Cold War. In today’s world it is utterly irrelevant because subsequent to the Soviet Union’s disappearance into the dustbin of history there remains no rival military superpower which poses a remote threat to the liberty and security of the American homeland. In the year 2024 America doesn’t need “strength” to deter hostile like-sized enemies because, well, there are none.
So today’s $1.4 trillion national security budget – including $70 billion for foreign aid and operations and $380 billion for the deferred cost of the Forever Wars in the form of veterans benefits – is a colossal, unaffordable waste. And it is the preponderant source of the very thing which Washington should be backing down from – namely, the America’s existentially threatening runaway public debt.
That figure was $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan took office; $19 trillion by the time the Donald stumbled into the White House; stands at $36 trillion today; will top $60 trillion by the end of the next decade based on current built-in spending and borrowing; would exceed $70 trillion by the same point (2034) under the sweeping tax cuts and spending increases already proposed by the Donald; and will hit $150 trillion by mid-century under the CBO’s latest Rosy Scenario outlook.
Yet the Donald chooses to appoint to the single most crucial fiscal job in the entire Federal government a flag-waving champion of military glory. And one who is also an ill-informed hawk who foolishly thinks America is imperiled by enemies on every side and that we can bomb our way to safety, even in the case of a third-rate power like Iran that poses no military threat to the American homeland whatsoever.
Nevertheless, Hegseth sounded like Curtis LeMay in an interview during the Donald’s last stint in the Oval:
After the Soleimani assassination, Pete Hegseth called on Trump to bomb Iran’s energy production facilities, ports, and nuclear facilities. He said Trump should even bomb mosques, hospitals, and schools if deemed necessary.
More importantly, his top priority seems to be rooting-out DEI and wokish nonsense from the armed forces:
See the rest here
Be seeing you
MCViewPoint 