{"id":31874,"date":"2012-09-04T09:20:06","date_gmt":"2012-09-04T13:20:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=31874"},"modified":"2012-09-04T09:21:33","modified_gmt":"2012-09-04T13:21:33","slug":"panetta-defense-cuts-and-weekends-in-ca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=31874","title":{"rendered":"Panetta, defense cuts, and weekends in CA"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post<\/a>, in a link sent to us by Chief Tango, talks about Leon Panetta, the Defense Secretary, and the dilemma he finds himself in what with $1.2T in defense cuts looming on the horizon. Clearly, Panetta was sent to DoD as a hatchet man who merely salutes and executes, but the Washington Post sympathizes with him;<\/p>\n

By contrast, Panetta sometimes sounds more like a congressman representing the \u201cPentagon district\u201d than the leader of the world\u2019s largest military. He talks frequently about his parents, who immigrated from Italy. And he regularly rails against the possibility that the Pentagon will have to absorb $500 billion in automatic cuts if Congress cannot agree on how to trim $1.2 trillion in government spending. The cuts, triggered under an arcane process known as sequestration, would come on top of an already mandated $487 billion in reductions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s mindless, and it will…do incredible damage to our national defense,\u201d Panetta said last month in a speech in New York.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then, without blinking, the Post reports the thing that we’ve been harping on for months here since we found out;<\/p>\n

As he did during his days as a congressman, Panetta spends most weekends in California, commuting home on a military jet at a cost of more than $800,000 as of this spring, the latest figures available.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Doesn’t anyone find it incongruous that he’s charged with reducing our defense posture while he spends taxpayer dollars to go home every weekend on the other side of the country – a perk that none of the people who work for him are allowed. He has tens of thousands of soldiers deployed to a foreign shit hole far from their families and homes who don’t get to see their families for months at a time, yet he gets to spend a million or so dollars to see his EVERY WEEKEND.<\/p>\n

The Post goes on to explain that our “new” enemy is China and that our focus, in regards to defense, should be on Asia. Last I knew, Iran was still rattling their sabre in the Near East. While I agree that China is a threat, but, it appears to me that Iran is a more immediate threat, what with their terrorist cells spread through out the world and their work on their nuclear program that no one seems to have the fortitude to confront directly.<\/p>\n

The wars we fought in the Middle East are not over until we’ve somehow restrained Iran. Embargoes don’t seem to be having the desired effect. I guess facing Asia will give the administration another “win” when China hasn’t taken over the world four years from now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post, in a link sent to us by Chief Tango, talks about Leon Panetta, … Panetta, defense cuts, and weekends in CA<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,84,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-military-issues","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}