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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (10020)	9/30/2003 3:02:30 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 794309

the problem with Bush is his policies, a much more significant problem than Clinton's mistakes, which were personal. Yes, it is different. And you can strong disagree with the policies without resorted to personal hatred. That is what we are seeing. As I have said before, I blame it on the 24/7 news cycle. The media is encouraging any and every type of controversy now. The newsman, Sandy Van Ocher,(sp) has a clip on TV right now that talks about his start in the bzz. He says, "it used to be you went to work and that was it. But it all changed with Watergate."

To: JohnM who wrote (10020)	9/30/2003 3:08:57 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 794309

"The New Republic" is doing a review of the weapon systems coming on line, with an eye for getting rid of some of them. The Defense Budget went up 100 Billion the last two years, and more is in sight. Cutting these purchases is a big deal. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Today's is the F22 Raptor fighter. Originally designed to replace the F15 Eagle "air superiority" fighter, the F22 began life on auspicious terms--the Air Force held a 1991 "flyoff" at which two competing designs, both privately built for low cost, performed spectacularly well. Everything since then has been downhill for the Raptor program. It's now twelve years later and the F22 is still not in service. Planned numbers have declined from about 700 to about 300--the United States built about tens of thousands of fighters during World War II--while unit prices have gone through the roof. In 1991, the F22 was projected to cost about $60 million each, in today's dollars. Unit price for 23 Raptors in the current fiscal-year budget ballooned to $201 million. That's three times the inflation-adjusted price of the last few F15s purchased; more, for this single-seat aircraft, than the going market price of an entire Boeing 747. You can read the saga of F22 price escalation woes here. In terms of performance, the F22 would surely be the best tactical aircraft ever. It is the first airplane able to "supercruise"--sustain supersonic speed for long periods, rather than just a couple minutes. The F22 is highly maneuverable, and advanced stealth features make its "radar cross section" about the size of a child's marble. Raptors are stuffed with gizmos that no plane now possesses, especially passive sensors that will allow those aboard F22s to see other planes without giving away their own positions. There are a few glitches in the program--"Mean Time Between Failures," the standard measure of weapons-system reliability, was for the F22 recently redefined as "Mean Time Between Instability Events." Gulp. Overall, Air Force pilots would dearly, dearly love to move from F15s into F22s. But as the price of the Raptor has escalated beyond sticker shock, its mission has almost vanished. The F22 was designed to take on the top interceptors of the old Soviet Union. Neither Russia nor any other nation on Earth is currently even attempting to build a fighter that existing United States fighters don't already totally outclass. Between existing United States air superiority and new air-to-air missiles being added to existing U.S. fighters, billions for a super-interceptor seems a luxury. As the need for a new super-fighter declined through the 1990s, the Air Force changed the designation of the Raptor from the F22 to the FA22--meaning fighter/attack. A new role of dropping precision-guided weapons was added. But that mission, too, is vanishing before the Raptor is even fielded. From Vietnam through the Kosovo air war, most precision-guided munitions had to be delivered by fighters flying close to their targets. Since the development of the GPS-guided bombs that dominated this year's attack on Iraq, the need for small attack aircraft has declined sharply. By far the largest bombing punch of the Iraq assault--about 15,000 of the 30,000 munitions used, according to the Pentagon document "Operation Iraq Freedom By the Numbers"--was satellite-guided weapons dropped from high altitude by lumbering heavy bombers. Ever-higher percentages of smart bombs are expected to fall from high-altitude heavy bombers in future conflicts, or be delivered by a new generation of low-cost cruise missiles under development, or be delivered by relatively low-cost unmanned drones aircraft under development. When bombers already in the inventory can carry 16 of the big satellite-guided smart bombs per flight, and an F22 can carry one, the need to spend $200 million each on the Raptor seems to have disappeared. The F35 Joint Strike Fighter, which just got out of prototype and is also awaiting production funding, is a 10-years-fresher design than the F22; would be nearly as good at interceptor missions and better at ground attack missions; and it's looking like the F35 will cost an average of around $45 million each, one-quarter that of an F22. To top it off the F35 contract was won by Lockheed Martin, the same company fitfully trying to build the F22, so canceling the Raptor will not shrink the defense industrial base--Lockheed Martin will still get a huge new fighter project. Checkmate; this ought to end the Raptor program, and the Air Force ought to move on to F35. Purists will lament the demise of the hottest, best-looking military aircraft ever to take wing. But when a much newer design can do 99 percent what the F22 does for 25 percent of the cost, only pork barrel politics will keep the Raptor alive. Can Donald Rumsfeld cancel the F22? This looks like the first real test of his vaunted "transformation" of the military. So far Rumsfeld has stopped just one program, the Army's Crusader super-howitzer, and the first motive here seemed to be Rumsfeld hates the Army. But Rumsfeld, a former fighter jock himself, loves the Air Force. If he gives in to the Air Force on F22 after canceling the Army's Crusader--a much less expensive program than F22, and one that would have brought the United States military a needed new capability--Rumsfeld will be exposed as a sham reformer. tnr.com

To: JohnM who wrote (10020)	9/30/2003 3:13:33 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 794309

The "New Republic" Blog. Yesterday we said no to the fabulous-flying, ridiculously overpriced F22 Raptor. Today we ponder the Littoral Combat Ship. Looking like a techno-update on the Union's Monitor ironclad of the Civil War, the Littoral Combat Ship is designed to sail close to enemy shores; be relatively hard to detect on radar (all current surface ships make excellent radar targets); be mostly automated so that the crew is almost weirdly few (perhaps as few as 25); be very fast; have a shallow draft; and sink submarines, shoot down aircraft, destroy mines and hit shore targets, perhaps with an upcoming new weapon, the small cruise missile. Basically, Littoral Combat Ship is a junior version of the recently shelved Zumwalt-class destroyer. (Zumwalt destroyers, designed to deliver hundreds of cruise missiles quickly, might make a comeback once Littoral Combat Ship is accepted.) The Littoral Combat Ship prototype proposal goes by the zoomy name Sea Blade. Littoral Combat Ship reflects an upcoming choice for the Navy, which is whether to continue building "surface combatants"--that is, non-submarines. Already the United States Navy has nine supercarrier battle groups, nine more than the rest of the world combined, with the Ronald Reagan just commissioned. A tenth supercarrier, the George H. W. Bush, is under construction, as are its escort ships. (You can lay odds there will not be a supercarrier William Jefferson Clinton.) With the United States on track for ten times the carrier strength of the rest of the world combined, it's hard to see how to justify funding for more surface warships. Unless somebody invents a fundamentally new class of such vessels--enter the Littoral Combat Ship. All current U.S. Navy fighting ships are designed for the "blue water," or deep ocean. Littoral Combat Ship would be pretty much the first American vessel in more than a century intended to hold coastal areas and bombard shore emplacements. Lockheed Martin, the contractor, is currently running radio ads in Washington implying that Littoral Combat Ship would be used to protect the American coastline. That's nonsense. All the navies of the world combined could not get within 500 miles of the American coast; if a hostile naval force approached the United States, any one of our supercarrier battle groups could overtake and systematically sink it far at sea. That's the beauty of having more naval power than all other nations combined. In conventional naval terms, the United States is invincible. (Innocent-looking freighters with terrorist weapons are another story.) How would Littoral Combat Ship really be used? Most likely, to prowl the waters off the Western coast of Africa. Here is a topic for another day, but over the next one or two decades, U.S. oil purchases are likely to decline in the Persian Gulf and rise in the Gulf of Guinea, where significant new fields are being found. West African oil would be much preferable to Persian Gulf oil--fewer entanglements, no Arab despots to suck up to as their princes stab us in the back. In military terms, the West African coast is a much better environment for tankers than the Persian Gulf. Tankers leaving West Africa for the United States would simply sail due West into the blue-water ocean, where the United States Navy has total domination: avoiding the Strait of Hormuz, never passing within gunnery range of Iranian positions at Gazdan and so on. If Littoral Combat Ship's real purpose is to control West African waters at affordable cost, it is a good sign that the Navy is looking ahead to this mission, because substitution of Western Africa oil for Gulf State oil will be a huge political advance. The Navy does sort of admit the project's purpose in code: It says the Littoral Combat Ship will "ensure maritime access in any environment." Why Washington isn't already twisting Saudi arms with the prospect of a switch to use of West Africa oil isn't clear. Perhaps it is because institutional Washington has not yet realized what the real purpose of the Littoral Combat Ship project is. If there is another Arab-Israeli war, Littoral Combat Ship might also be useful in providing emergency fire support to Israeli forces. Though a word to the wise to the IDF. Should Israel, deliberately or accidentally, decide to fire on a Littoral Combat Ship in the way it fired on the U.S.S. Liberty during the 1967 war, attacking forces are not likely to last more than a few minutes before being reduced to hot slag. So, presumably, Israel would both benefit from any Littoral Combat Ships entering its waters, and have considerable incentive to cooperate with them tnr.com

To: JohnM who wrote (10020)	9/30/2003 3:23:11 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 794309

Damn! I post that the media is stirring the pot, and Luskin (Krugman Truth Squad) does just that. He postulates a "Times" op-ed war. __________________________________________________________________________ September 30, 2003, 9:20 a.m. Op-Ed Shoving Match And David Brooks shoves back hard. Donald Luskin - NRO Paul Krugman took a hiatus from his New York Times column in order to jump to the paper's best-seller list with his book, The Great Unraveling. He's been all over the tube with his story that the Bush administration represents (as he says in his book) a "revolutionary power" like the "totalitarian regimes of the 1930s," one that wants to create an America "possibly — in which elections are only a formality." About the only TV show where he hasn't peddled this paranoid shtick is Saturday Night Live. He even showed up on Buchanan & Press, although Pat Buchanan hounded him into stammering helplessness (with a little coaching from yours truly). It got to the point where all Krugman could say was, "Well, all right. Let’s — you know, I thought we were going to have a discussion here." That's media code for "Hey, you said I'd get to promote my book!" Today, after a two-week absence, Krugman's column is back on the op-ed page of the Times. It's his usual verbal carpet-bombing of innuendo, distortion, and assertion presented as fact — delivered with supreme self-assurance and just enough truth here and there to make it devastatingly effective. Bush lied. Bush is corrupt. Halliburton. Quagmire. Bush lied ... you get it. Same old stuff. But today there's something different, too. Something quite wonderful. It seems that while Krugman was busy promoting himself and his paranoid anti-Bush vision, David Brooks — the Times's new conservative op-ed columnist who started just three weeks ago — got mad as hell and decided he wasn't going to take it any more. Right next to Krugman's latest screed is a column by Brooks that is nothing less than a literary cruise missile aimed straight at Krugman's heart. Of course he doesn't mention Krugman by name. The Times would never let him. But he doesn't have to (it's even classier that way). But the intent is unmistakable. And it's deadly. Brooks's column is called "The Presidency Wars." In it he noted that the "culture wars" of the 1980s and 1990s have given way to bitter, hateful combat over the very legitimacy of the president. Brooks wrote, The culture wars produced some intellectually serious books because there were principles involved. The presidency wars produce mostly terrible ones because the hatreds have left the animating ideas far behind and now romp about on their own ... now the best-sellers lists are dotted with screeds against the president and his supporters. A cascade of Clinton-bashing books hit the lists in the 1990's, and now in the Bush years we've got "Shrub," "Stupid White Men" and "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them." And — it goes (literally) without saying — The Great Unraveling. "Terrible." Brooks has Krugman's MO down cold: The quintessential new warrior scans the Web for confirmation of the president's villainy. He avoids facts that might complicate his hatred. He doesn't weigh the sins of his friends against the sins of his enemies. But about the president he will believe anything. He believes Ted Kennedy when he says the Iraq war was a fraud cooked up in Texas to benefit the Republicans politically. It feels so delicious to believe it, and even if somewhere in his mind he knows it doesn't quite square with the evidence, it's important to believe it because the other side is vicious, so he must be too ... The warriors have one other feature: ignorance. They have as much firsthand knowledge of their enemies as members of the K.K.K. had of the N.A.A.C.P. In fact, most people in the last two administrations were well-intentioned patriots doing the best they could. The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the haters themselves. I have to admit that, until now, I have been very disappointed with Brooks. I worried whether he would have the guts to make a difference at the liberal Times (see "Is Brooks Partisan Enough?" August 14, 2003). His first couple columns were, well, terrible. The inaugural one asserted that the Bush administration pretends in public to be infallible, but nevertheless adapts to criticism — sounds innocuous enough, but it came off as a variation on the "Bush lied" theme. Several days later a Krugman column sideswiped Brooks by using his own logic to turn his mild criticism into a scorcher. Krugman wrote, ... I disagree with those who think the administration can claim infallibility even while practicing policy flexibility: on major issues, such as taxes or Iraq, any sensible policy would too obviously be an implicit admission that previous policies had failed. And thus the op-ed shoving match was started. And now Brooks is shoving back hard. It's something I doubt the typically non-confrontational Brooks would have done in the normal course of sharing a page with Krugman. But when Krugman stepped off the op-ed page for a while, and recreated himself as a media celebrity with a paranoid neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that got him onto the best-seller lists (next to the likes of Al Franken), he made himself fair game. At the moment of his greatest triumph, Krugman has made himself vulnerable by daring to venture outside the aura of prestige provided by the "newspaper of record." Outside that aura, his crazy and hateful ideas don't seem quite so authoritative as they do on the op-ed pages. In fact they're rather silly and embarrassing — to both Krugman and the Times. Now that Krugman has stepped outside, maybe Brooks's column today is symbolic in some sense that the Times is reluctant to let Krugman back in. — Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your comments at don@trendmacro.com. nationalreview.com

To: JohnM who wrote (10020)	9/30/2003 5:15:32 PM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 794309

(a) the Reps ranted and raved about Clinton as an illegitimate president because he didn't get over 50% (I'll never forget the Dick Armey quote about "your president"); and (b) the problem with Bush is his policies, a much more significant problem than Clinton's mistakes, which were personal. LOL! Clinton made no mistakes...LOL...Bingo! That is the problem...Clinton did nothing. People who do nothing make no msitakes.

To: JohnM who wrote (10020)	10/1/2003 12:14:39 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 794309

the problem with Bush is his policies, a much more significant problem than Clinton's mistakes, which were personal. John, Republicans did regard Clinton's tax raises (some were even retroactive) and his attempt to reengineer the entire health sector, just to give two examples, as real and actual policy problems. There wouldn't have been the animus to go after Clinton's personal problems if they hadn't found the policies extremely alarming. Just as with the Democrats and Bush today. Except that Bush doesn't present the same weaknesses, so they're seizing on whatever they can.