Neocons Trade Medicare for War

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Neocons-Trade-Medicare-for-by-Robert-Parry-110614-312.html

For decades now, America's neoconservatives have pushed for higher military spending and baited their political opponents as being "soft" on whatever the enemy-of-the-day was: Moscow, Nicaragua, Cuba in the 1980s; al-Qaeda, Iraq, Iran, Libya in recent years.

The neocons happily smeared Americans who opposed the huge Pentagon budgets, tagging them as anti-American or disloyal. They were people who would "blame America first," as Ronald Reagan's neocon Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, famously declared.

The neocons, who first rose to prominence under Reagan in the 1980s, also put fiscal responsibility in the back seat whenever the trade-off was more military spending. Indeed, Reagan's first budget director, David Stockman, has traced the origins of today's budget crisis, in part, to the neocon insistence on bloated Pentagon budgets.

Last year, in a New York Times op-ed entitled "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse," Stockman said one of those "deformations" resulted from the fact that "the neocons were pushing the military budget skyward."

More at the link --