For years now, my Republican pals have been telling me about how brilliant Charles Krauthammer is. I'll grant you that "Krauthammer" is a brilliant name and something I call my favorite sexual position, but that's as far as I'm willing to go.Whenever I try to give Charles a chance to bedazzle me with his smarty pantsness, he fails spectacularly. I just hear the same moronic talking points that I hear everywhere else, only haughtier. And no one will be haughtier than the great George Will, who I quite like. Will actually is a guy who is smarter than everyone else, whereas Krauthammer only plays one on TV.
The only thing I can attribute Charles Krauthammer having a career at all to the modern penchant of journalists to interview one another and pretend that they're accomplishing something.
Krauthammer, like most Republican pundits, discovered fiscal discipline on January 20, 2009. It was on that exact day that they discovered that there was a spending crisis. Okay, that's not exactly fair. Some of the more visionary members of the GOP realized that too much money was going poof the day after the 2006 congressional elections. The crisis, of course, was that they were no longer the ones spending epic amounts of money on nothing. In short, fuck them.
In case you were wondering, there are few things that I hate as much as the space program. All that it's ever produced is bragging rights and Tang. It is a money-pit that only made sense during the Cold War because it was essential in making ICBMs work properly.
President John F. Kennedy declared America's intention to go to the moon fifty years ago. In those fifty years, the U.S federal budget has been balanced only five times, in 1969 and 1997-2001.
Given the dire state of America's finances, you would think that something of such limited utility as the space program would be the first place that fiscal conservatives would want to cut. But Republicans like Charles Krauthammer aren't fiscal conservatives, remember? They only play them on TV.
Republicans are awfully strange people, thinking as they do that the government can't delivers the mail, but should set a moral example for everyone on borrowed money. I believe that because the government can't deliver the mail, they shouldn't set a moral example because that moral example would turn us all into John Edwards. Or John Ensign. Or, worse yet, Larry Craig. We'd all have fun, and Republicans hate that.
You might not agree with or like my views, but you should agree that it takes a special level of stupid to argue that the government should be kept small and constrained because of it's inherent incompetence, yet still strap people onto giant rockets and fire them into space, regardless of the cost.
The space program has accomplished virtually nothing in decades other than provide great deals of pork-barrel spending to Texas and Florida, neither of which can exactly be described as short of unnecessary military bases.
Does it cost a lot of money, in the grand scheme of things? No, but it costs enough. I agree with Krauthammer when he says that, say, Obama's health care reform bill is too expensive. But it's very hard to take those arguments seriously when the person making them still wants to spend billions of dollars on his Buck Rogers fantasy. When that person is also advocating brand-spanking new wars, the rhetoric approaches the point of lunacy.
People like Charles have gotten a free ride for far too long. Serious conservatives should start asking people like him where, how and how deeply programs like Social Security, Medicare and Defense should be cut, and why they aren't as precious as the space program.
But you know as well as I do that that'll never happen.
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