I do not have experience with military service under any administration, so I might not be the best positioned to respond to the particulars here; but it seems, imho, that time-lags and military R&D timelines can extend way beyond the tenure of any president, even a two-term president. I am very reluctant to say that the US military is the product of any one particular presidential administration, either for good or ill. I rather like to think of the U.S. military as a non-partisan American institution which is always second-to-none in the world regardless of who happens to occupy the White House.

Clinton had EIGHT YEARS of budgetting power over the military, and there’s no way that didn’t affect force size, equipment inventory, readiness and morale.

But the notion that the press trumpets these liberal canards worldwide is spot on. That’s a major drawback of the old monolithic liberal press spearheaded by the NYT - there’s very little ‘diversity’ of coverage. Fox is a drop in the bucket to this day compared to the TV networks. Franken’s lie is just one in an endless series of such. Remember Clinton braying that the Republicans were ‘cutting’ health care, when the budgets were increasing? Thanks to the leftie press, that message was burned into everyone’s brain uncritically.

Mr. Sensitive - How fickle and sensitive you are! Your ilk uses the fact that Republicans controlled the House of Reps from 1994 onward, and had periodic control over the Senate during these years, whenever you want to claim partisan success for anything good over this time period. If you even read Huessy’s article, you’d know that he gives credit to the Republican Congress for military budget increases during the Clinton years. You make it sounds as if Clinton did not have to work with a Republican Congress during his tenure to get any budget approved and passed.

Also, another bit of friendly advice, get off your persecution by the liberal press bandwagon and stop the whining, it doesn’t suit your namesake as “insufficiently sensitive.”

What essentially went on in the 90s is that the Clinton folks cut military spending to favor domestic spending but the Congress re-inserted defense money into other areas in other bills that Clinton wouldn’t veto. But military benefits did get cut under Clinton, and retention was a huge issue, as was morale. I know because I was there, and was one of the airmen that the Clinton military didn’t retain. And the rate of system cannibalization was intolerably high.

As for R&D, your’re quite right, Jimmy, that those timelines are much longer than any two-term presidency. Most of the smart weapons that keep our troops alive while killing the bad guys today are products of Reagan-era research initiatives, some are products of Carter-era initiatives, and some are Bush I and Clinton-era initiatives. No one president can claim all of them as his own, nor can any party hack spinner say that his favorite president created the military that won the wars.

So Franken is lying, or simply ill-informed. Or both. Option #3 is the most likely, imho.

Mr. Huck,

The rants against the liberal press will slow down when the NYT fesses up to the despicable lies it published from Walter Duranty, fawning over Soviet success while Stalin deliberately starved six million people. And while we’re waiting for the Times to divest itself of the Pulitzer it accepted for those lies, you might like to read James Lileks today on other members of the press monolith pontificating in a manner calculated to supporting Saddam in power under all circumstances.

Slightly OT, Justin Katz debunks the “Bush Lied” meme.

Mr. More-than-sufficiently Sensitive - With regard to Duranty, you sound like a good liberal who likes to complain about a problem rooted in the distant past but which influences your current gripe. You’d have better feet to stand on if the NYT had refused to disavow Jayson Blair. I won’t waste my time investigating how the “liberal” press covered other more ideologically palatable tyrants of the past such as Rafael Trujillo or Fulgencio Batista, but I’m sure I could dig up some sugar-coated journalism about our anti-communist crusading dictator allies of the moment, too. What is more troubling to me than Duranty’s lies of the 1930s are Ann Coulter’s lies of today. Perhaps you’d like to give Duranty’s Pulitzer to Coulter? As for the Lileks babble on “members of the press monolith pontificating in a manner calculated to supporting Saddam in power under all circumstances,” I’ll just say that, if it’s true (which I doubt), I’d suggest that they were only acting on the lead given them by that foreign affairs guru, Bush I, about the strategic necessity of leaving the tyrant in power to torture his people for a good 10 more years. You still want to harp on about the “sins” of the past?

Mr. Huck,

Naa, let’s look at the present. See the BBC get exposed for sexing up its attack on the Blair gummint? All Andrew Gilligan managed to do with his cute little misspeakings was to drive a consciencious man to suicide, and to allow a Parliamentary inquiry to expose how the BBC thinks it’s the Opposition instead of a news agency. BBC corporate culture is worse than Enron.

So, now it’s not the sins of our past, but rather the sins of the former colonial oppressor. You’re a better liberal than I could have ever imagined.

How quickly you forget that Blair is a “liberal” leader of the “leftist” Labour Party. At least the “liberal” British media attacks “liberals,” too.

Which brings me to the next point: the BBC is, obviously, British. So are the sins of the former colonial master my sins, too? Do I, as an American, have to defend the BBC?

Hey, come to think of it, if the BBC does fashion itself in opposition to the “leftist” “liberal” Labour Government of Blair, I wonder if that makes the BBC a “rightist” “conservative” Tory information vehicle? Just a thought.

It’s just a shining example of a corrupt lying ‘news’ organization seeking to control the agenda. You can’t trust nobody.

But Blair did the right thing in Iraq, as did Bush, while the liberal press devoted all its resources to cavilling and sneering and ignoring the sudden drop in monthly deaths among Iraqi civilians as soon as the invasion was well under way.

Huck, the BBC is pissed at Blair for not being sufficiently lefty.

That wasn’t even a good try. You’re really just an apprentice troll, right?

I enlisted in ‘86. Got RIFted in ‘95 after trying for a couple of years to get out.

I saw the change and it was bad. Not just morale and manpower but training and ability fell. When I first joined we could expect someone out of tech school to be competent enough to do the job with minimal supervision and to certify TIG within a few months.

By the time I got in we could look forward to spending another six months in OJT to get them to the level where they could certify and do some of the basic welding or machining tasks that someone somewhere cut out of the tech school curriculum to save money.

And morale was shot, mine, my co-workers, just about everyone I knew. By ‘95 there were jobs that only certain people could do, because they had the skill level necessary. People who had developed that skill level didn’t re-enlist, or had been in too long without promotion to re-enlist. Either way the Air Force lost some of its best technicians. Legendary welders and machinists.

Kal