Amazing that Halperin can suggest two polar opposite things resulted in these Presidents failures and conceal it in a pile of verbiage.

Everything about this piece is false, phony, and dishonest. It has a surface form of a comparison and an argument but as soon as you scratch that surface it all falls apart. It portrays itself as media criticism by a media person but is not in the sense it was intended. Rather it makes you wonder about the state of the media if this is the kind of criticism that a media person would come up with and which that bastion of Establishment media the New York Times would put its imprimatur on.

And this is even without taking into account all of the political angles and subtexts: a slap at the Clintons, an oblique defense of the weak Republican field of Presidential candidates.

eCAHNomics @ 5

Didn’t see it, but I suspect he meant defense as % of GDP. Also, war is off-budget, so some trickery there.

Even so, defense shouldn’t be thought of that way, but rather what are we getting into with defense spending. Look at outputs, or results, not inputs.

I thought with the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the $100 billion spent on Star Wars(over the past 25 years) the Defense Budget would be quite large.

Maybe it’s equivalent, in inflation based dollars, to the peak Reagan Years that sent the economy into a recession and the country into deep deficits.

I just wanted to ask about George Will just said that the Defense Budget is small by historical standards on ABC’s This Week. And Nobody challenged him. Are they all asleep? In general I don’t watch the shows because of the low quality.

Maybe he’s comparing it as a % of some economic measure like GDP or GNP or maybe the well-known GOP drop point.

But when he starts spewing such things as this he should also tell us that the war in Iraq alone will cost the average American family $20,000 (and that doesn’t even include the rest of the military budget).

Of course, his rejoinder will be something like “But that’s only $3000 in WW2 Money”. Or $20,000 is only 12,000 Euros…that’s not even enough to pay for my Faberge eyeglasses.

In fact the two characteristics that Halperin asserts resulted in failure for Clinton and Bush, respectively, are direct opposites.

He claims that the easygoing “all things to all people” Clinton should have been a less flexible and more of a stubborn idealogue when he came into office.

Then he asserts that Dubya was doomed by not being more flexible and not so stubborn.

First it’s amazing that Halperin can even compare the failures of Clinton with Bush. Clinton’s two terms were broadly considered economically succesful and productive in terms of education, job production, reducing the Federal deficit and debt, not entangling the US in costly and deadly foreign conflicts (Somalia was a Bush Sr, legacy, while Bosnia and Kosovo were generally successful campaigns that ended ethnic cleansing). There were some failures but these were almost all due to reactionary push-back by a Republican controlled Congress, or the knowledge that they would interfere with any policy efforts (Rwanda, Health Care, Kyoto Accord, Anti-Terrorist Legislation after OK City, Disabling N Koreas Nuclear Facilities). Even his Welfare Reform plans had less apparent impacts on the poor than expected as there was a booming economy and lots of employment.

Imagine if all that legislation had not been swallowed up by the bottomless Whitewater investigation and Republican intransigence.
The genocidal wars in Central Africa may have been averted, we’d have an America not beset with greedy HMO’s and insurance companies that remove services or clients off their protection. Global Warming wouldn’t be lapping at our doors causing droughts, wildfires in Winter, and Katrina-like hurricanes. Improved airline/airport security may have saved one or more of the 9/11 flights, and perhaps warned others. North Korea and Iran might be in total IAEA compliance. And the $$$ saved from not invading Iraq would be available to pay off the deficit, used for protecting social security, and provide better health care and education.

Amazing that Halperin can suggest two polar opposite things resulted in these Presidents failures and conceal it in a pile of verbiage.

Public is too lazy to listen to substance

Press doesn’t like to cover substance.