POSTED RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORNTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
"F-35 fighters are the price of sovereignty"
Surely this ranks as the most block-headed caption I can recall reading on a Globe editorial. It reads like a quote from some Pentagon-supplied crib book for the press.
What on earth does subsidizing the Pentagon's purchase of these costly planes - which is effectively is just what our purchase represents - have to do with our sovereignty? The Pentagon will be putting them to good use in its endless chain of colonial wars all over the world.
We could not hold off the United States - the only genuine future threat to Canada's sovereignty in both the North and the Great Lakes - for twenty minutes.
The United States has become a military Frankenstein monster, spending - quite literally - more than the entire rest of the planet on the military.
Our purchase of this plane - for which we have almost no use - is a subsidy to the Pentagon's acquisition of them. The small fleet we can afford represents little genuine military capability.
And readers should be aware that the capital cost of acquiring these planes, high as it is, is only the beginning.
Modern high-tech, high-performance military planes require immense and costly maintenance efforts.
They are almost like Japanese Kobe cattle being hand-rubbed and fed beer every day.
America's "stealth" fighter and bomber, for example, must each have special climate-control hangers, and they take the kind of attention to detail of the space shuttle after a flight in orbit. The costs are staggering.
This purchase is about the stupidest waste of money a person could come up with, only excepting a continuation of our dismal mission in Afghanistan, something which also does no more than support the Pentagon’s hormone-driven insanity.
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"Protection, undefined, as in this editorial, is little more than a racket."
Good line, that.
How very true, much resembling the undefined use of words like security or sovereignty.
Dumb and meaningless, but appealing to the herd instincts of many.
The chest-thumping knuckle-draggers are out in force on this one - mainly, I suspect, aggressive little boys who like expensive, bright toys (so long as others pay for them).
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"MacKay's announcement is another indication of a serious minister putting serious tools into the hands of the people who protect us."
Peter MacKay's entire history in cabinet is marked by poor performance in his various roles, childish insults mumbled in Parliament, and a rather feeble effort to appear a forceful figure.
Strong is the last adjective any thinking person would apply to him.
Protect us? From what? The boogey man?
Well, he finally found his niche, the military, where money is thrown around like confetti and everything is justified with totems like “protect” or “security” or “sovereignty.”
Carried to its limit, that kind of thinking gives you the Pentagon, the most wasteful, destructive, and anti-democratic force on earth, and a major contributor to the decline in the United States now clearly underway.
