Brilliant ideas

Over the last few weeks, as the escalation in Afghanistan become a unavoidable reality, some of our elected betters, David Obey being one of them, decided to challenge the conventional wisdom that war is free by arguing that we should actually submit our happytime bombing adventures to the same budgetary principles we make everything else fit into. Even though Obey's "war tax" proposal, which only actually covered spending for 6% of the war, was laughed out of the room by the "serious people" who know that military spending doesn't count as spending, it has given others ideas on war spending. People like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told his colleagues during a closed-door GOP lunch Tuesday that the best way to fund the war would be to use unspent stimulus funds, according to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the third-ranking Republican.
...
"We know the stimulus failed. It was sold to the Congress and to the American people with the suggestion that it would hold unemployment below 8 percent. We know unemployment is over 10 percent," said McConnell. "If we're looking for a way to fund several years of the war I would suggest unexpended stimulus funds would be a good place to start."

Brilliant. I mean even though there's a litany of information showing things like, I don't know, how the stimulus actually averted a much larger crisis and how there's still a lot of good it can do, seeing as only a quarter of it has been spent, we need to stop undertaking measures to fix the economy and job markets and plow all of our remaining money into a largely pointless, unwinnable war.

Thanks Mitch, with Susan Collins actually contributing substantively to health care earlier, I had filled my head with childish notions of rational behavior in the Senate and GOP caucus. Thank you for reminding me that the vast majority of your party is a childish group of pro-war halfwits who want to pull the economy down on top of themselves because they see political benefit in doing so. Short circuiting the economy to pay for more war.....priceless Mitch, just priceless.