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March 27, 2007

Confused Americans for Truth - Senate Votes for Surrender with Pork

by Ferdinand T Cat

Sometimes I love the way journalists work. Here is how MyWay News describes the spending portion of the Iraq surrender bill just passed by the Senate.

The debate came on legislation that provides $122 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as domestic priorities such as relief to hurricane victims and payments to farmers.

Here's another way of looking at the same bill, courtesy of the AP Wire.

$100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan, plus

  • $100 million for security required by next year's presidential nominating conventions
  • $1.2 billion over the next five years to subsidize small dairy farmers
  • $20 million to combat Mormon crickets
  • $4.2 billion in disaster aid for farmers
  • $6.7 billion in additional federal efforts to Katrina victims
  • $3.1 billion to implement military base closures
  • $2 billion for port security, airline baggage scanning, and local mass transit security grants
  • $747 million for health care to children from low-income families
  • $640 million in heating subsidies
  • $500 million to fight Western wild fires

Most of these are bribes. You can be sure that the people receiving these bribes believe all this spending is absolutely necessary, but if they are genuinely good ideas, why do we need them on a bill about the Iraq War? More important, why did MyWay News lead with the hurricane bit and gloss over the rest?

The answer is that MyWay wants you to think the Democrats aren't engaging in the same old business-is-usual spending-for-votes thing. It's a bad way of doing business, but it exists because of a peculiar problem with the way government works. If you want to do something nice for your district that doesn't benefit anybody else, your only choice is excessive spending. You can't do the best possible thing that a politician can do for a voter-- cut taxes-- because the tax cuts will benefit everybody. If you tailor tax cuts to a particular district, people would notice, and then it would be obvious your government is built on bribes instead of principles.

It would be a great story for a crusading journalist to write, but they don't. Instead, they tell you that it's a heroic thing to abandon the people of Iraq, and oh yes, along the way we're spending a few billion for hurricane relief and stuff.

This just goes to show you that journalists are not superior life forms.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Rightlinx, third world county, A Blog For All, Adam's Blog, basil's blog, Shadowscope, Pirate's Cove, Planck's Constant, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, and Conservative Thoughts, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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