Bush's New Pentagon Handout Exposes Nation's Hypocrisy

The Pentagon is many things, but underfunded is not one of them. The Department of Defense this week sent Congress a request for more than $622 billion dollars for operations in 2008, an amount that the Pentagon says will still fall about $30 billion short of funding all its programs.

Since Congress isn't known for its stinginess with handouts to the Pentagon, it's very likely that the P will have no trouble obtaining its traditional windfall. Since just over $140 billion is slated for the wars Iraq and Afghanistan, it's a safe bet that a good portion of the remainder will go to various officials' pet projects and to handing out the sweetheart contracts that keep corporations like Halliburton and Boeing raking in obscene profits.

While gargantuan Pentagon budgets have become an integral part of each year's spending requests, what few have bothered to ask is where the money for the nation's war machine comes from. Not from taxes on the filthy rich and on corporations, as George W. Bush reminded us over the weekend, when he emphasized again his wish that Congress make his monstrous tax cuts permanent. This, he said, is essential to "keep America's economy growing." At the same time, these tax cuts for the rich, coupled with ever-increasing Pentagon spending will, by some mysterious means, "eliminate the (record) deficit by 2012." Who knew Bush could do magic?

As he continued harping on the need to pour money into defense programs-which might better be called "offense" programs-Bush invoked "the troops," and the need to fully fund their efforts in "winning the war against extremists." Indeed, Bush made this statement, calculated to tug at the heartstrings of the patriotic, despite the fact that his administration and its compliant Congress have consistently failed to see that soldiers are provided even the most basic necessities.