It's the Republican excuse for lining up with the insurance lobby to oppose health care reform. It's the pretext for racist hatred and resentment of Obama. Crazed old people dribble about it at right-wing funded astroturf rallies. Greasy young conservatives and their flabby elders maunder about it in magazines and newspaper articles. Charlatans Beck and Limbaugh fulminate about it. It's the frame used by phony centrists and non-partisans to pretend to seriously debate the unhinged illogic of the right. It is a loud and tough old canard whose quacking echoes from The Economist's Lexington to the halls of Congress: The right wing opposes "big" government. And yet deboning this duck is child's play.
The US military forms part of the US government. In budgetary terms, it's one of the largest parts of government. Accounting for current wars and current outlays on past ones, allocated interest on debt, veteran's benefits, and all other indirect costs, and a case can be made for the military as the largest single part of government.
Ronald Reagan increased spending on the US military by 40%. George W. Bush's military spending increases were even higher. But the right adores Reagan and admits of no criticism of him, while continuing to defend Bush despite his legacy of unmixed catastrophe.
So let us please lay this tired old deboned canard to rest, most appropriately inside a similarly prepared turkey. The right does not oppose "big" government. The right is a staunch defender of vastly increased government -- provided government is making massive transfer payments to defense contractors and spending hundreds of billions on fleets of missiles that miss their targets, high tech airplanes that don't fly, massive sitting duck (that word again) war ships, endless wars with no purpose. The right only objects to government spending on education, health, housing, and other items of actual use to the taxpayers who provide the actual funds.
That makes the position of so-called conservatives on "big" government perverse. Which means rightists are not defenders of a government which governs best by governing least, but perverts.