For forty-eight years, according to the New York Times, no group of Senators has been gutsy enough to stand together and kill a Defense Authorization Act.
For forty-eight years straight, the Senate has approved the yearly Pentagon budget. In the righteous speeches of Senators, that is the money that keeps us safe! It pays for ships and guns and the blood and tears of our noble fighting men and women. This is sacred ground. Not approving the Defense Appropriations Act is akin to treason!
They approved it the year the Pentagon Papers proved that top government officials had blatantly lied in order to push us further into Vietnam, resulting in the deaths of thousands of US troops and Vietnamese civilians.
They approved it when the war in Iraq failed to find weapons of mass destruction.
They approved it when a Pentagon audit showed that a trillion dollars was missing … which means stolen. Can you imagine the audacity of an important agency that can’t find the records for a trillion dollars in an audit?!?… or the audacity of Congress to keep on appropriating money even knowing that Pentagon thieves are stealing us blind?
They approve it for weapons systems that don’t work, for planes that even the military says are unnecessary.
They approve massive increases each year even though U.S. military spending alone now almost equals that of almost the entire rest of the world.
But just this week, our Senate rose up in indignation and failed to approve the Defense Authorization Act. They finally found their backbone! They finally got wise to the greedy military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower railed against – the war profiteering, the lies that lead the waste of lives, both our soldiers and the millions of innocent civilians on the ground in the countries unlucky enough to have come into our sights.
What’s that? No? They didn’t rise up against all that? So… why did they kill the Pentagon’s funding?
Our heroes in the Senate, well, the entire Republican delegation and a couple of Democrats, rose in indignation because of a provision that would allow gay and lesbians to serve in the military without fear of being kicked out!
I’m speechless.
