The Elephant, You Should Excuse the Expression, In the Room

Of course it's actually worse than that: the Timesmen can't avoid adopting the Right's Inhuman Resources Program as fact: Medicare and Medicaid bust the budget, but the 55% (conservative, but not "conservative" estimate) of the Federal budget which goes to military operations is as invisible as we pretend a Stealth bomber is.

Y'know, at every goddam turn there's another excuse for our incontinent militarization, for continuing to spend at WWII levels, whether the threat is the Soviets being sorta close to us in megatonnage (see Missile Gap, The) or some guy lighting his underwear on fire in Canada. We're the fucking Windows™ of hard power: we insist on never actually obsoleting the junk we sold the Rubes two generations ago, like they might remember, so we're continually defending the Fulda Gap, preparing to storm Quemoy and Matsu, weaponizing Space, touching up Mutually Assured Destruction, preparing to best the Kaiser at Jutland, and shopping for video-game weapons systems, all at once, and all with no sense of fitting anything together. And meanwhile, in case no one happened to notice, getting bogged down for decades inside countries which didn't even have armies when we invaded.

Doghouse Riley, of course.  Bats Left/Throws Right.  Not a baseball blog.  Speaking of which, Mike's Mets seems to be on hiatus...