Weather vane, that’s what Ryand is and he will change when the winds of war change again. Pure short-sightedness and pandering, what a gutless, spineless, jellyfish.
Defense spending is a euphemism for war profiteering at the expense of someone else’s kids lives.
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Damn! Senator Aqua Buddha is road kill already? NOO!!!
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Any ideas what Randy wants to spend the $190 billion on? Any particular weapon systems we’re desperately in need of? Are those pay raises for our soldiers? What is it that could be so important that a let’s-cut-the-defense-budget-libertarian does an about-face and increases defense spending by an amount roughly equivalent to the entire GDP of Peru?
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I think we can be pretty sure that the rank and file won’t see a penny of that increase. It’s strictly about feeding the corporate MIC.
Libertarian…what a joke. It’s just a label for those embarrassed to call themselves Republicans. Nothing other than the label has changed. Well, that and weeeeeed!
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Let’s contrast this with Obama, who toned down his hawkishness during his first presidential election season so much that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before he had actually done anything. Once in office Obama turned into the war hawk from hell, betraying people like me who voted for him. Paul, in hopes of getting the Republican nomination has done just the opposite.
This is only a “reversal” if you believe Rand Paul has “principles” greater than his ego.
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Your mission is obvious.
My “mission” is to restore the Democratic Party to the wonderful thing it was before Obama and the Clintons turned into Republican Lite.
Shorter Paul: “We’ve already established what you are - now we’re just haggling over the price.”
And the highest billionaire bidder is…?
You’re a Carter man then, that’s your paradise, really? You must’ve been hedging against the economy. No wonder you don’t like President Obama.
So you like the Obama foreign policy, then. Thanks for sharing.
Yes I do in many, many ways but not all wiseass. I guess you think that we are going to just get out of the world’s business and elect an isolationist or total anti-military President. Maybe you’ll stand on your head and fart jelly beans too.
That’s lala land and all the smart mouthing you can do won’t change the fact that America is the world’s big brother.
Instead of taking cheap shots, how’s about you lay out the realistic American plan that fits perfectly into everyone’s POV and secures us worldwide while maintaining 100% peace and then describe how our half insane elected officials are just going to merrily go along with smarts and groups like ISIL too.
Some appreciation is what you need to gain. The ME mess was dumped in President Obama’s lap and has gotten worse exponentially. Its easy to make comments but suggesting that the Prez is just warring it up for funsies is ridiculous.
Please share your wisdom wiseguy.
That reply is the very definition of Panglossian.
Having a thesaurus doesn’t mask lack of wisdom or genuine ideas. Why did you even bother to respond, do you just have to get in some form of disagreement?
You are hellbent on implying something like, that I shouldn’t be positive about President Obama or at all. And yet you offer absolutely nothing but a two dollar word. Why would anyone side with you?
Optimism is a good thing and it is what I have always been gifted with. Do you have some need to bring others down to your pessimistic, fatalistic, negative level?
America has to have a President and considering all choices, I’m thrilled with Barack Obama and he has made my natural optimism even greater. I can be optimistic and realistic at the same time easily.
You appear to be geared for disappointment and that isn’t hard to find. You have to work a bit at finding the good.
Thesaurus? I’ve actually read Candide.
Sorry, pal. I’m not going to work at finding the “good” in the foreign policy of an imperial power that spends an amount on its military that approaches the military spending of the entire rest of the world.
I might vote for the lesser evil — even work for his campaign — but this is strictly harm reduction.
I’m not going to pretend that the harm isn’t harmful.
Preach it, Brother Steve.
Don’t call me pal, bub, first off.
Lots of I don’ts and I wont’s add up to zero. Are you just going to exist in America whilst you despise it or do you have a plan? Which country is it BTW that spends just right on defense and is involved just enough militarily that suits you?
And how is your complaining or trying to recruit others to be a less optimistic helping? This was the original point right, that you scoffed at me being optimistic or at my appreciation for President Obama. It had nothing to do with military spending, this is a deflection by you.
If you are working on harm reduction, then you are already doing what you realistically can, not letting things get worse may be the only thing within your power to do. Do you have some other, grander plan?
Unfortunately, there are those that don’t care that we are tired of war both here and especially in the ME. How can we just step off? I’m sure, absolutely positively sure, that President Obama would be out if the opportunity were there and it was feasible but he’s making some really hard decisions that are his job not necessarily his own personal wishes.
I too am deeply concerned with military spending and what goes unpaid for because of it. I don’t begin to believe that that is all on President Obama or all that he is all about. The world is a complicated thing though with lots of bad actors that can’t just be ignored, what are you advocating?
What I’m advocating is doing the best that we can, while not lying to ourselves about the fact that the American experiment has essentially failed.
• We have, by a considerable margin, the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world.
• For an extremely wealthy country, we have an insanely high infant mortality rate. The ACA is a solid step that may lift us up into the third tier of industrialized nations with respect to basic health care metrics.
• We are at the beginning of the end of the antibiotic era. A Manhattan Project-like effort to develop new antibacterial agents to fight drug-resistant infections is urgently needed. To a first approximation, nothing is being done. (This is an area where I have specific professional expertise, by the way.)
• The US labor movement has effectively been neutered as a force for positive social change.
• Wealth and income divergence have all but eliminated socioeconomic mobility.
• Operationally, this has already made the US an oligarchy, not a democracy or a republic.
• We continue to use more energy — by a large margin — than the citizens of any other country.
• We have built out a car-dependent, dispersed, and now decaying infrastructure that essentially guarantees that our energy consumption patterns will not change on a meaningful time scale.
• We have done essentially nothing meaningful to curtail carbon emissions. The concentration of atmospheric CO2 is currently above 400 ppm — long understood as the tipping point for irreversible effects on climate stability — and CO2 levels are still climbing at a greater-than-linear rate.
• Our military spending is at insane, crippling levels.
• US-sponsored assassination and torture have been normalized. Yes, Bush/Cheney were worse, and vastly so. Yet we have seen neither significant war crimes prosecutions nor even a truth and reconciliation process.
• No one has a plan for dealing with the health care expenses of the baby boomers (I’m not particularly worried about social security; Medicare is the real impending problem.)
• Our status as the world leader in science and technology has stalled. the EU and the Chinese are pulling cleanly past us by a number of metrics. We will neither have the expertise nor control the intellectual property required to drive critical technologies in central areas of physical and life sciences.
Etc., etc., etc.
And the GOP will continue to control at least the House for at least another decade — maybe more — due to gerrymandering. There are more and less graceful ways for the American experiment to fail. But at this point there seems little reason to think that it will not fail. Obama’s not a bad guy, but he’s essentially the captain of the Titanic, running around with a caulking gun as water pours into the breach — and the GOP keeps lobbing grenades into the hold.
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So we can stop pretending that Paul is a “libertarian” now, right? And that, in fact, there is no such thing in American politics?