I bequeath to you the Eternal Republican Talking Point, my child. Use it well, or at least often.
We're doing this again, I see. We do it every single election, and now we're doing it again because no matter how powerful our military is or how many nations we could obliterate in the same amount of time it takes FedEx to deliver a package the Republican line of attack is always, always, that having even one more non-Republican president
will doom us all.
And yet, there was Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) last week, delivering a big speech on foreign policy, embracing Romney’s argument as his own.
“[President Obama] wasted no time stripping parts from the engine of American Strength. He enacted hundreds of billions in defense cuts that left our Army on track to be at pre-World War II levels, our Navy at pre-WWI levels, and our Air Force with the smallest and oldest combat force in its history.”
First, the defense cuts were part of the Republicans’ sequestration policy, not the White House’s agenda, making this an odd line of attack. Second, Romney’s discredited argument from three years ago isn’t any better now.
Thirdly,
no really—President Obama did not "enact" hundreds of billions of dollars of sequestration cuts. The Republican Party, suddenly having discovered after eight years of George W. Bush pissing away money and launching a trillion-dollar second middle eastern war for no other reason than Because His Advisers Thought The Timing Was Good, that deficits were now going to murder us all in our sleep if we didn't gut government functions
right now, Great Recession or no Great Recession, demanded a regime of asinine cuts designed to be asinine after all the collective cretins of America's two legislative chambers couldn't bring themselves to compromise on any plan even a bit less asinine than that. Truly, it was a magical time.
So yes, Republicans merrily cut the defense budget and called it a "victory", and while they could end those pointlessly asinine cuts tomorrow, provided they were not still on vacation, doing so would also restore money for medical research and feeding poor people and generally not being asinine for the sake of being asinine, and Marco Rubio et al are not actually so concerned about America's supposedly decaying military might that they'd be willing to sign off on any of that. So here we are, and oh look—it's election time. Again.
It does leave at least one obvious question; whether Marco Rubio, actual sitting senator for reasons known only to the voters of Florida, actually believe that our Army and Navy are less powerful than they were before World War II. As in, the fine senator who wants to be president would, if given the choice, rather go to war with America's pre-World War II military than with today's version. That he'd rather have the Air Force of 1947 than the Air Force of 2015. Because Obama.
No, I don't think any of us honestly believe he does. He doesn't believe it, it is just the talking point that each Republican naif wanting to sound properly belligerent and Cheneyesque must, by party rules, spout off. Republicans are, according to Republicans, super-duper excellent military leaders and strategists, setting aside all recent evidence to the contrary, and you'd better damn well let them pay down the war debt by cutting government services or insert enemy here will come and kill your family next Thursday.
This is why people loathe politics. It's the lying. The comical, ridiculous, rigorous, stupor-inducing lying. Marco Rubio has less military expertise than three quarters of America's video game playing twelve year olds (special note: by the time I was 20ish, my NATO forces had defeated major Soviet air and sea operations in and around Europe on dozens of occasions, and all of it without the aid of a color monitor or stereo sound, you little console-bonded guttersnipes), but Marco Rubio's convinced the American military is on the brink of ruin if the nation isn't willing to step up and put Marco Rubio and his own generic fill-in-the-blanks one-size-fits-all conservative candidate standard-issue foreign policy in charge of it all.
Or at least that's what he's willing to tell people, because running on the Republican presidential ticket means you have to commit yourself to being a huge, shameless liar. The only good news of any of it is that you can recycle the same bullplop for literally decades—Rubio's copy could have been mimeographed during the Reagan era and kept in an old school lunchbox until the day Marco Rubio was finally old enough to run for president himself.