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Speaking Ill of the Dead

I, for one, am glad John Murtha's gone, and you should be too. Here's why:

1. The man voted for and pushed votes on (not to mention got earmarked) money to be spent on UNWANTED military hardware, mainly to appease his lobby. You want to know where the military spending waste came from, blame him.

2. He was deeply in the pocket of major defense contractors, like Boeing, Raytheon, and others, and purposely steered projects to his home state. Yes, like the congressman from Kansas, he was a MAJOR parliament whore who brought home the bacon for his state. Many of the defense contractors were home-based in his state.

3. He did his damndest to GET money for building airplanes, tanks, weapons systems, and other hardware, and he did his damndest to KEEP money and projects flowing to his state. Murtha was #2 for corruption and bringing home the bacon--behind the #1 Alaska senator Ted Stevens, who got indicted for improper use of campaign funds, moving Murtha to the #1 position.

He also did his damndest to EXTEND programs that the military tried to phase out--we're STILL producing and over-producing the KC-150 cargo ship (as well as refueling planes) from post-Vietnam, even though we no longer have a legitimate use for it. We also produced BOTH kinds of Osprey-type planes with tilt-rotor (the Osprey and its competitor) for years beyond the time it took for people to get the idea that our soldiers can't fly then correctly (since the 60's). Forty-some years later, we finally figured out how to fly and use the Osprey in battle (in an age of drones that can bomb for us, and helicopters that can drop and extract soldiers from the ground).

What I want to know is "WHERE IS OUR JOHN MURTHA FOR THE SPACE PROGRAM?" With all the money that was wasted over the years in unwanted and unneeded military hardware, we could've gotten to the moon, built a base, and then gone to Mars!

The cheapest substance with unlimited source is hydrogen...from space--it's full of it. THAT could have been our "alternative energy", but Obama put an end to that forever. Hopefully, John Murtha's passing will put an end to over-spending on antiquated military hardware and vehicles, and unwanted vehicles and hardware for the sake of bringing home the bacon.

UPDATE: Article from Slate Magazine--"Unindicted and Misunderstood"

"Murtha was "not interested" in a bribe that did not go directly to his hometown. The fictitious Abscam sheik's bribe meant nothing to Murtha unless it was an earmark for his district. That's why, try as they did for three decades, federal prosecutors never nabbed Murtha: He didn't want to be rich. He wanted to be powerful. So far, that's not illegal.

Murtha's stature within Congress was predicated on his power: his ability to turn the spigot of federal dollars on or off depending upon his goals, strategy, even his mood. He served on the appropriations committee and, at life's end, chaired its outrageously well-endowed defense subcommittee. This penchant for directing federal dollars into his district, the perennially recession-wracked 12th of Pennsylvania, annoyed reformers."

...

"If someone were to accuse him of redistributing the wealth, he'd have smiled and said he certainly was: He was sending it back where it came from."

...

"In short, to his dying day, John Murtha saw lobbyists as clerks, Washington as the bank, and himself as little more than a conduit for the flow of those dollars back to his district. For all that clarity, nobody of virtue understood him. And nobody in his district could understand why anybody beyond the Alleghenies saw him as anything other than Robin Hood with a per diem."

Posted by Cute at 8:40 PM

Labels: financial (non-tax), politics, taxes