What Does Republican Dan Webster Stand For? Well, it is not good math or honest debate. Does Washington need another dishonest Republican that is great at babbling nonsense but has no honest answers.
Despite their history of running up the national debt when they are actually in power, leading conservatives have made complaining about the national debt a central theme of their political campaigns.Webster is one of those guys who have to lie and exaggerate to make a point. Maybe that is part and parcel of also believing that women are second class citizens. From 2000 to 2008 Bush Republicans like Dan did a lot of whining about the deficit even as they created the largest debt in history - leaving the mess for Democrats to clean up ( not very responsible or patriotic behavior). Right-wing conservatives like Webster are doing a lot of complaining now - and as before they have no serious plan - complaining and making up math is not a plan, Neocons Talk Deficit but Won’t Budge on Defense Cuts
It was this theme that GOP candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives Dan Webster was touting at a meeting with voters late last month. While fearmongering about the amount of public debt the United States now holds, the congressional candidate went as far as to say that “you could combine all the economies of the world and you could not sustain the borrowing that we’re doing”:
WEBSTER: We’re borrowing 4 billion dollars a day, that’s impossible. We are in trouble. We’re in big trouble. Even Hillary Clinton said two weeks ago that if the borrowing continues it will be a threat to national security. That’s not us. That’s them saying that. Even the congressional budget office has said that is unsustainable. You could combine all the economies of the world and you could not sustain the borrowing that we’re doing. So we have to turn off the faucet.
When Webster refers to the “the borrowing that we’re doing,” he’s talking about the $1.3 trillion dollar budget deficit. It is simply incorrect that the rest of the world’s economies combined would not be able to sustain those levels of debt. The CIA World Factbook estimates that the Global World Product — the sum of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the world’s nations — was approximately $58.15 trillion for 2009. Meaning that the global economy produced 44 times as much in 2009 as it would take to completely pay down the U.S. budget deficit.
This hypocrisy was on full display on Oct. 4, as American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks, Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner, and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol penned a joint op-ed for the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page on why the defense budget should be totally off limits to budget cutters.Republicans lied us into Iraq and bungled victory in Afghanistan the least they could have done is pay for their treachery. Instead they left it and now claim to be pissed off at how slow it is taking to pay for their screw-ups.
First, they claim the military is not the “true source of our fiscal woes.” No one is saying the defense budget is the sole source of the deficit, but the fact is that it has risen from 3 percent of the gross domestic product in fiscal year 2001 to 4.7 percent this year. That additional 1.7 percent of GDP amounts to $250 billion in spending — almost 20 percent of this year’s budget deficit. And according to a recent Congressional Research Service report, the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone accounted for 23 percent of the combined budget deficits between fiscal years 2003 and 2010.
Brooks, Feulner and Kristol then claim that “terrorism and piracy in sea lanes around the world,” potential future threats from a “nuclear Iran” or a China “that can deny access to U.S. ships or aircraft in the Asian-Pacific region” justify a defense budget only slightly smaller as a share of GDP than at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear missiles targeted directly at the United States.
Tufts University foreign policy expert Daniel Drezner was underwhelmed by the argument. “Terrorism and piracy are certainly security concerns — but they don’t compare to the Cold War,” he said. “A nuclear Iran is a major regional headache, but it’s not the Cold War. A generation from now, maybe China poses as serious threat as the Cold War Soviet Union. Maybe. That’s a generation away, however.”
American University defense expert Gordon Adams was equally unimpressed by the trio’s rationalization:
It is little more than a façade to justify growing defense budgets as far as the eye can see, affordable or not. First, we are leaving Iraq as we speak and will be drawing down in Afghanistan starting next year… [which] frees up a considerable amount of military personnel. Second, anyone who thinks terrorists and pirates justify a $700 billion defense budget and a 2-million-person force (actives and reserves) has clearly drunk way too much Kool-Aid. These missions are important, but they do not drive anywhere near that number of forces. Third, …The U.S. has ample sea and air power to cope for decades with a rising China, whose economic pursuits pose a much more significant problem for the U.S. than their military pursuits.
The fact of the matter is that China spends half the share of its GDP on defense as the U.S. — less than $100 billion last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the primary source for internationally comparable data on military expenditures. That’s less than 15 percent of what we spent. According to SIPRI, the military budgets of every nation on earth other than the U.S added together would only come to 46 percent of the total. In other words, the U.S. defense budget is 54 percent of world military spending.
Sharron Angle's pastor on Harry Reid: "His religion's a cult". - The pastor of the Reno church where Nevada's GOP Senate candidate worships shares his opinions on Mormons. gee what happened to conservatives who said they believed in freedom of religion. Does Angle realize that Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is a Mormon.
Another tolerate conservative Republican Glenn Beck - How many anti-Semites does Glenn Beck have to cite?
The problem with conspiracy theories (well, one of the problems with conspiracy theories) is that they function as a playground for bigots. Theories like birtherism or 9-11 trutherism come to be popular in anti-Semitic and racist circles because they help to validate in the minds of these people that which they already believe to be true -- that the world's problems can be laid at the feet of ethnic group X or religion Y.
For someone like Glenn Beck, who tries (and fails) to walk the line between conspiracy theorism and legitimate history, encountering anti-Semitic cranks is unavoidable. This puts him in the somewhat comic situation of having to carefully weed out the bigoted aspects of already disreputable theories, and then trying to convince everyone that he's a historian, and not a lunatic.
Beck, it seems, isn't up to that challenge. Over the past few months, several anti-Semitic authors and theories have popped up in his TV and radio monologues, and Beck's audience of millions is, unwittingly or not, being exposed to some of the most hateful rhetoric of the last century.
