COUNTERPUNCH shows Grassley some Love! (seriously)

[emulatorloo]

Dunno I just found this morbidly fascinating. I know that COUNTERPUNCH seems to never meet a Democrat they like.

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney02132009.html

Weekend Edition
February 13 - 15, 2009

"The Bill Lynn I Know"

Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

By CHUCK SPINNEY

The attached speech regarding the wisdom of the nomination of Bill Lynn as Deputy Secretary of Defense was made yesterday on the Senate floor by one of my heros, Senator Chuck Grassley, a pig farmer from Iowa. Grassley has dogged the Pentagon about its shoddy accounting practices since 1982, when he was freshman Republican senator. His acts of political courage put him repeatedly at odds with Ronald Reagan at the height of Reagan's popularity.

They stand out in my memory as being unique in my quarter of century's experience in Versailles on the Potomac. There is certainly no Democratic equivalent of this courage in the current debate over Lynn's contentious appointment.

I can also say from personal experience, that the cavalier behavior toward the Constitution's Accountability Clause described in Grassley's speech is entirely consistent with the attitude displayed by Lynn when he was the head of my organization in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The Deputy Secretary of Defense is the central manager of the internal workings of the Defense Department. He is the man who is supposed to make the trains run on time for the Secretary of Defense and the nation. As I explained in Counterpunch (June 27, 2008), the "Defense Reform Trap” the defense apparatchiks begain working hard to ensure Barack Obama would protect the status quo, while he was a candidate for President. That is because the Pentagon is now in the advanced stages of a death spiral that has been tightening since the late 1950s, and things are so bad that increasing the defense budget actually tightens it further, a fact that the Bush Administration just proved beyond dispute. The history of habitual conduct in over 40 years of Republican and Democratic administrations makes it clear that professional and appointed leaders in the Pentagon have had neither the desire nor the ability to extricate themselves from the mess they have worked so assiduously to create.

In fighter pilot lingo, the apparatchiks are out of altitude, airspeed and ideas. And President Obama's solution is to rush into the trap by appointing the same people who contributed to this problem during the Clinton Administration.

Lynn will be confirmed (in fact he may already have been confirmed), and he is a nice guy, a pleasant collegial chap, so to speak. But he won't rock the boat, because he is a weakling and a lobbyist who knows where his bread is buttered. And, as Grassley's speech documents in detail, Lynn's demonstrated performance in senior defense positions during the Clinton Administration proves he has neither the character nor the motivation to understand and make the changes needed to correct the Pentagon's self-destructive decision-making process. But if your goal is to protect the status quo of Military - Industrial - Congression Complex under a phoney mantle of "reform," Bill Lynn is just the ticket.

As Grassley shows below, Lynn's appointment makes a mockery of President Obama's promise to bring change to Versailles on the Potomac.

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