Sex, Taxes, War, and the GOP

A self-righteous but non-committal announcement by the Department of Defense informed us that four-star General Kevin Byrnes, the third ranking of the US Army?s eleven four-star Generals, has been summarily dismissed just three months prior to retirement? because he had SEX with a woman not his wife!  Mind you, he had a completely clean record up to this peccadillo, and he and his wife had been separated for at least a year. And, so far as we know, he did not commit this adulterous liaison with someone under his command, or even connected to the DoD. This raises a few questions: why the studied silence on such details? Could they be even more embarrassing for this oh-so-uptight administration?

Speculation is a-buzzing... who was the opposite party? Female? Male? Under age? Related to the Powers That Be? Just how kinky was (is) the relationship? And so on. Inquiring minds can only speculate, noting that no, repeat no, four-star general has in recent memory ever been removed for ?disciplinary reasons.?

Some mean-minded folk (?liberals,? no doubt!) can?t resist pointing out that it?s apparently okay in Rumsfeld?s looney Pentagon for upper ranks to order and condone sexual humiliation and torture in American detention centers like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.  For instance, note how two top commanders in the system (General Wodjakowski and Colonel Warren) were in fact promoted .  Also note how our new Attorney General was rewarded for advising the Commander in Chief on how to side-step the Geneva Convention? while only lower ranks were punished.  Well, it is true that one officer did get slammed: General Janis Karpinski, head of the prison.  But, she was a woman, so her offense was apparently deemed especially noteworthy compared to that of all the male officers involved, like, say Major General Miller, who apparently instigated some of the worst ?interrogation? methods at both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Maybe the key problem for the Republicans here is that it?s not okay to have consensual sex for pleasure, but it is okay to impose kinky sexual degradation and torture on the helpless... Not to mention some other even more serious faults which were handsomely rewarded, like insisting we had proof of WMDs (worth a Medal of Freedom for George Tenet and Paul Bremer), or dismissing warnings about Osama bin Ladin prior to 9/11 (worth being named Secretary of State for Condoleezza Rice), and so on. On the other hand, throwing General Byrnes to the wolves could be considered a red meat distraction to the antsy right wing, which has been unexpectedly complaining about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts? credentials on gays... we must have purity on SEX, remember.

At the very same time General Byrnes was being crucified, most of the members of BRAC (the independent commission examining the DoD?s proposed list of base closings) announced that the Defense Department ?probably? overstated the 20-year savings of $50,000,000,000 (yes, $50 billion) by as much as 50 percent. Said Anthony Principi, Chair of the BRAC, ?...if
the savings aren?t there, and it costs (TAX-payers?) money to do this on top of all the economic upheaval, why are we doing this?? Yes, indeed. Secretary Rumsfeld promised annual savings to TAX-payers of $5.5 billion after the initial costs were paid (estimated to be $24 billion), but an investigative arm of the Congress took a look and said that almost half (47%) of the promised savings came from cuts in the military, who would actually be reassigned to other installations, so we?re dealing with phantom ?savings.? One more boondoggle it would seem. Maybe Rumsfeld thought the shell game would make up for his having badly underestimated the costs of the Iraq war (remember the outside-the-budget requests for $85 mill here and $85 mill there?)

And, speaking of the WAR, we now learn that the Pentagon, having failed to provide the troops with adequate body armor (to such a degree that they or their families were actually buying the personal armor on the open market) still isn?t doing it. That is, the procurement system broke down and proposed shipments of the armor will not be forthcoming as promised. The alibi is that they had to investigate the improvements further, and the pipeline wasn?t coughing the product out fast enough. This from a business-oriented civilian leadership that can?t get its act together.

Besides, we are now hearing that the vaunted purpose of the WAR has again been modified. We?ve gone from WMDs and terrorist connections to enduring freedom, to secular democracy for the Middle East, to ?self-sustaining economy,? to ?getting out is going to be a more important consideration than the original...unrealistic... goals.? (Quote in the Washington Post on 14 August from Wayne White, former head of Department of State?s Iraq intelligence team).

So, over 1,800 American dead later (and untold thousands of Iraqi civilian dead), we are exactly where those "damned liberals" said we?d be in the very beginning. If only the Republican leadership weren?t so hung up on SEX, TAXes, and WAR, they might have a better grip on the real world and might actually make better decisions.

This kind of careless arrogance and peculiar hangups on SEX, TAXes, and WAR runs like a red cord through the Republican Party from the very top National level right down to State and Local party units. They are trapped in an irrational net of their own devising, and can?t get out of it. Why would any reasonable, intelligent, moderate population ever put one of their ilk into office?

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