Democracy Has Prevailed.

May 29, 2007

The Trib Editorial Board - Another Smear?

I am wondering if this is a pattern. Recently I pointed out how the Trib's editorial board was extending the life of a smear long since debunked.

Today, it looks like they're doing it again. Take a look. In an editorial about how underarmed the Air Force is, they include this paragraph:
The armed forces were degraded during the Clinton administration after the end of the Cold War. Subsequently, Congress and President Bush have not provided sufficient procurement funds.
OK, so they slam (if that's the right word) the current administration in the second sentence. But is the first sentence actually, you know, accurate?

Not according to Lawrence Korb, undersecretary for Defense in the Reagan Administration. He wrote this in 2003:

The Clinton administration actually spent more money on defense than had the outgoing administration of the first President Bush. The smaller outlays during the first Bush administration were developed and approved by Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who were then serving as secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff respectively.

Clinton's last secretary of defense, William Cohen, turned over to Rumsfeld a defense budget that was higher in real terms than what James Schlesinger had bequeathed to Rumsfeld when he took over the Pentagon for the first time in 1975 at the height of the Cold War.

Korb then goes on to list all the improvements bought and paid for by the Clinton Administration; Smart weapons, the Tomahawk cruise missile and Patriot missile systems were all improved during the Clinton administration.

I'm sure the picture is far more complicated than I can imagine. But on the other hand, it's always fun to find a subtle smear on the Tribune-Review's editorial page.

4 comments:

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

You are forgetting the "Peace Dividend".
Take a look at this graph
I wonder who was President during the dip between 1993-2000.

Of course defense spending went up at the end for Clinton to have his immoral and illegal war in Kosovo which he lied about mass graves with 100,000 dead and ethnic cleansing to get the US involved.

Note the last is tongue-in cheek, but I like to give you anti-war types a taste of your own medicine.

Anonymous said...

Of course defense spending went up at the end for Clinton to have his immoral and illegal war in Kosovo which he lied about mass graves with 100,000 dead and ethnic cleansing to get the US involved.

There WAS ethnic cleansing and there WERE an estimated 100,000 dead in Kosovo. Just last month, Serb paramilitary members were found guilty of War Crimes for their involvement in the massacre at Srebrenica. The only thing that was determined was that Milosovic was not responsible since he had no control over the Bosnian Serb Army.

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

It would interesting to see where the Guardian got the estimate of the dead.
It appears they pull them from their arses
Since the war ended, forensic teams have exhumed 16,500 bodies from more than 300 mass graves in Bosnia.
...

An estimated 260,000 people were killed and 1.8 million driven from their homes in the 1992-95 war.

Richmond K. Turner said...

The Navy was delighted to commission me when I graduated in 1989. They wanted to keep me all the way through 1992. In 1993, they suddenly told myself and all of my classmates that a very large percentage of us would need to "voluntarily" separate from the naval service.

They accomplished the draw-down this by limiting our options tremendously when it came time for new orders. Most officers were given a single unpalatable offer for their next assignments. If you didn't like it, you had to resign your commission.

This isn't sour grapes on my part. My CO wanted me to stay in and was retiring. He called in a few favors and got me a much better set of orders than the detailer had offered to me. But by that stage, I was on the verge of getting engaged and another 24 months sea-duty (after already doing 40 months) didn't look all that appealing. In my case, the separation was truly voluntary. But for many of my shipmates, it was anything but.