I have stated before that I rarely find Al Franken funny any more, but he was just on What Do you Know? with Michael Feldman on NPR this morning, and when Franken’s subject matter is the appalling Bill O’Reilly, he can be pretty damn amusing.
My favoprite thing he said was when he was discussing the well-publicized row between O’Reilly and Franken at the book convention. Franken stated:
Molly Ivins was there promoting her new book, Bushwhacked, I was there promoting my new book, Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them, and O’Reilly was there promoting his new book, Living With Herpes.
I laughed out loud.
*** Update ***
In other news, Peter Huessy says Al Franken is still a big fat idiot.
Emperor Misha I
Well, Al Franken still IS an incredibly un-funny moron, but I have to hand that one to him. That one WAS pretty durn funny.
Or maybe it’s just because I think that O’Reilly is a pontificating, sanctimonious twit. Well, 90% of the time anyways.
cameron
What Huessy forgets to mention is that Franken does his whole “clinton’s military” rif based on a quote by Cheney where he states(paraphrasing)”A president wins a war(fights a war) with the military of his predicessor”.
He is just taking Cheney’s own logic and applying it to the present situation.
If Huessy has a problem with that, maybe he should give Dick a call.
HH
Cheney being wrong doesn’t make Franken any less wrong. Also Cheney didn’t write a bestselling book on that.
Kimmitt
The vast, vast majority of the $75 billion that Congressional Republicans piled onto the military budget was for pork programs such as the Stealth Bomber, which — while cool — were of marginal military value.
David Perron
That’s odd, Kimmitt, considering that the last B-2 was purchased in 1993.
David Perron
Oop. Ordered in 1993; delivered late ’97. Still, considering that eleven out of the 21 Stealths were delivered prior to the start of the ’95-’00 period, and that development was initiated back in ’81, it’s hard to see the point that this was just written in as pork by the ’95-’00 Congress. But I’m open to persuasion.
And it would help if you’d noted anything else that you felt was pork in the military budget. I’m curious to see if we have agreement that the Crusader was…if not pork, just flat-out unnecessary.
And now…for what I like to call “anti-pork”. Too bad spam is already taken. Tankers: when should procurement have begun, and how many times are we going to go around the mulberry bush before we just bite the bullet and lease the planes from Boeing? And who are we going to have to fire to prevent this sort of thing from happening again?
RW
I remember them being used just months ago as part of the operation in Iraq. Then again, many soldiers didn’t use their sidearms, so maybe we need to revisit every foot soldier having one (we need money for universal health care, ya know). :)
Kimmitt
Well, sure, we *used* them in Iraq. We *had* them. But since none of them were as effective as a single refitted B-52, the money spent on them was probably badly allocated.
David Perron
Depends on what you mean by “effective”. The B-2 is effective in situations where the B-52 would not be. Whether the specific use of B-2s in GWII utilized that effectiveness is another question entirely. It is true, though, that a B-52 can carry about 75% more load than a B-2 can.
Kimmitt
I agree that the B-2 is useful in situations where the B-52 is not. I contend, however, that those situations are vanishingly enough unlikely that allocation of resources to the B-2, given its enormous expense and significant flaws, is a poor budget decision.
David Perron
That’s why there are only 21 B-2s in the fleet, and why no more are being procured. What’s really amazing is the upgrade schedule for B-52H has the same plane deployed for another FORTY YEARS. Yep, that’s about eighty years of service. Question: how many of you think they’ll hold together that long?
Another question: what’s the single most decisive blow we struck against the Iraqis in GWII? What say you? I say it was when this enormous column of Iraqi armor sallied out of Baghdad to intercept our forces. Then you heard of a B-52 mission out of Britain. Then…nothing at all about the armor column. It was done quickly, cheaply, and without a great deal of fanfare. And it wouldn’t have been possible at all if there was much more than a stick of Iraqi air defense left on top of another. For those kinds of missions, B-52s do well. For all the others, when we can’t suppress air defense, B-2s are the way.
Billy Bones
Peter Huessy and John Cole: two ignorant assholes. Cheney makes three.
David Perron
Wait, John. I think he just called you a big fat poopy-head. Better take a few microseconds to come up with a worthy reply for that.