November,2017, Part 9, Political Class Insanity: A $6 TRILLION Foreign Affairs Mistake and The Nonsense Of the Democratic Party

It is the beginning of another month which means it is again time to review the latest political class insanity from Washington and around the world. Political class insanity takes many forms including the wasting of taxpayer wealth, criminal fraud within government programs, inane and stupid political quotes and actions, the inability to create and implement effective and efficient government programs, stupid and ill performing economic policies and strategies, and other forms of insanity that continue to evolve and surprise and shock us.

1) One of the biggest spenders, and wasters, of taxpayer wealth has almost always been the Pentagon. Although it varies year to year, recent Pentagon budgets have usually been between $600 and $700 billion a year. A tremendous amount of money to be spent to defend the country.

And one reason why the budget may be so high is that the Washington political class has used and abused the Pentagon’s fighting resources to stick its nose into the business of countries around the world. And the success rate of these intrusions to other countries affairs has usually made a bad situation worse:

• After 9-11, Bush invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq in search of Bin Laden and to destroy terrorist nations and havens.
• This resulted in basically destroying two nations and two societies and helping spread terrorism even further throughout the Middle East.
• Obama took over and promised to have us militarily out of Afghanistan by 2014, another in a long list of busted promises.
• Not only are we still militarily in Afghanistan but Obama’s military strategies have allowed the Taliban to become almost as strong as they were when our intrusion began.
• In Iraq, against the advice of his military and diplomatic advisors, Obama withdrew all significant U.S. military personnel from the country in order to have a talking point in the 2012 Presidential election.
• Although he promised at the time that Iraq was secure, safe and democratic, with the withdrawal of U.S. troops, ISIS, the most heinous terrorist group of all time took root and shredded not only Iraq but Syria also.
• Obama poohed poohed ISIS, calling them the JV of terror groups, an assessment that could not have been further from the truth.
• Obama then began meddling in the Syrian civil war, looking like a fool when he drew “a red line” relative to chemical weapon use by the Syrian military and then did nothing when the Syrian military actually used chemical weapons.
• Obama also got us militarily involved in the Libyan civil war which went very badly, creating another terrorist haven in the Middle East.
• In addition, Obama dropped bombs and missiles on six different Middle Eastern countries in 2016 and probably earlier at the rate of over 20,000 a year.

Given our activity in all of these Middle East regions in the name of fighting terrorism, we are probably no better off from a safety perspective then we were when the first troops invaded Afghanistan under Bush. As we said above, the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan. Iran, our arch enemy, is vying for control in Iraq. The Syrian civil war continues unabated, creating ISIS terrorists everyday. Libya is a mess and Yemen, a country often bombed by U.S. forces under Obama, is being influenced by Iran and creating tensions with Saudi Arabia.

What a frigging and expensive mess. How expensive? Consider some research and analysis that was completed by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs:

• According to their estimates, the U.S. will have spent nearly $6 TRILLION between 2001 and 2018 to pay for our military intrusions into Middle East affairs and wars.
• This $6 TRILLION comes out to over $23,000 for every individual American taxpayer or over $1,200 per every American taxpayer every year for 18 years.
• While a Pentagon study, the “Estimated Cost to Each Taxpayer for the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria,” put the total at only $1.5 TRILLION, that is only for military costs.
• The Brown University study also looked at related costs not directly tied to Pentagon combat including Homeland security, State Department,and Veterans Affairs.
• Despite being more comprehensive, the Brown study thinks their $6 TRILLION might be too low: “This report has not included here state and local government expenses related to medical care of veterans and homeland security. Nor does this report calculate the macroeconomic costs of war for the US economy. And while this report discusses some of the ways that families bear the burden of caring for seriously veterans [sic], I have not added a value for the costs of their uncompensated care.”
• The $6 TRILLION is a whopping 30% of the entire Federal Government's debt burden.
• Besides the hard military costs, there are human suffering costs also since nearly 7,000 American servicemen have died and over 52,500 have been injured in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Incredible costs expended by the country by the Washington political class and what do we have to show for it? Not much. We have been attacked multiple times within our borders by Islamic terrorists, from the Boston Marathon to a bike path in Manhattan to an office party in San Bernardino, to dozens of places in between. Islamic terrorism is spreading around the world, from Africa to China. So for $6 TRILLION and 7,000 lost lives, the political class has delivered basically nothing, a foreign affairs failure unprecedented in American history.

2) Donna Brazile used to work for CNN. When things got dicy for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Party in 2016, she replaced then current DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and as a result she had an insider view of what went down behind the scenes during the 2016 Presidential campaign.

She has been in the news lately, talking about what actually happened back in those campaign days via her new book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House.” And what happened apparently is not pretty. We are going to discuss what her accusations and claims are in the next few days but as a teaser of how juicy her book is likely to be, we now know that she had the following opinions of major Democratic politicians from the past few years:

• She thought that Obama was a leech to the Democratic Party, that he only used the Party for his own ego and personal causes which helped drive the DNC into near bankruptcy.
• According to Brazile: “We had three Democratic parties: The party of Barack Obama, the party of Hillary Clinton, and this weak little vestige of a party led by (Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) that was doing a very poor job getting people who were not president elected.”
• Furthermore: “This was not working to strengthen the party. He [Obama] left it in debt. Hillary bailed it out so that she could control it, and Debbie went along with all of this because she liked the power and perks of being a chair but not the responsibilities.”

Fascinating and depressing stuff, assuming Brazile is telling the truth. Remember, Brazile is the CNN employee that compromised the integrity of a Trump/Clinton debate by giving Clinton the debate questions ahead of time. 

But if she is telling the truth, which is more than likely given what we know from other sources about the giant ego of Obama, the tyrannical ethos of Hillary Clinton, and the ineptness of Wasserman-Schultz, then this stuff is political gold. A leech, a controller, and an incompetent, these are the types of people inhabiting the American political class today. Scary insanity.

That will do it for this month’s standard political class insanity. In the next few posts we'll dive further into the insanity of Hillary Clinton’s world and her Presidential campaign.

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