Got this right wing email about the USS Reagan

[Lasher]

It includes a picture of our latest monster aircraft carrier, with some gee whiz statistics. Then it goes on to gloat with a photo of an ugly old barge that's supposed to be named after Clinton.

I've been enjoying an email war that ensued and while it is fresh in my mind I put together a response you might consider using if you ever receive it.

Did you know that during WWII most major aircraft carriers were named after battles? Battleships were named for states and submarines were named after fish.

But that was long ago, so I’m trying to figure out what the new naming convention is.

I see Clinton has a humble barge named for him “'for his foresight in military budget cuts and his conduct while president.” And Reagan increased military spending so that’s why he got a monster carrier named after him. But that can’t be right.

Measured in what economists call "constant dollars," adjusted for inflation, defense spending declined by nearly 15 percent between Reagan's last budget (for fiscal year 1989) and George H. W. Bush's last budget four years later. The decline was just under 13 percent between Bush's last budget and Clinton's final fiscal year (2001). In other words, the buying power of the dollars spent for defense declined more during Bush 41's four years than during Clinton's eight.

Bush 41’s secretary of defense explained that “overall, since I've been secretary, we will have taken the five-year defense program down by well over $300 billion. That's the peace dividend.… And now we're adding to that another $50 billion … of so-called peace dividend.” That defense secretary, of course, was Dick Cheney.

http://www.factcheck.org/more_mitt_missteps.html

And yet the next new carrier to come online is already named the USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77). What’s with that? I noticed Jimmy Carter got a new nuclear submarine, the USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23), named after him. I guess that’s because he was a submariner in the Navy. And Bush 41 saw combat during WWII, serving as a pilot aboard an aircraft carrier. So did Gerald Ford, and the next carrier after the USS Bush is already named the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) even though they haven’t started building it yet. So we name our ships based on what presidents did while they were in the military. But that can’t be right either.

Reagan spent WWII making training films and never left the United States. If that were the convention shouldn’t he have had a military movie theater or something like that named after him instead of an aircraft carrier?

So I guess it’s back to the spending thing. In that case I can understand how people might make a mistake in naming a carrier after Bush 41 because of a myth that Clinton cut military spending and Republicans didn’t. But it still seems kind of funny to use the USS Reagan to criticize Clinton because he didn’t spend anything on our military. After all she was ordered on December 8, 1994 and launched on March 4, 2001.

Clinton built the USS Reagan.