Fresh Recruits (200,000 Stop-Lossed)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3981670/

It's one of those little ironies of life that Democrats in Congress are pressing for an expanded military while their party prepares to nominate an antiwar candidate for president. With the exception of Joe Lieberman, all the Democrats sound like Howard Dean redux.

Meanwhile, the Republicans, the party of small government and fiscal restraint, are ginning up a big new spending program to send Americans to the moon while whistling past the deficits. President Bush will lay out his big-picture vision for the country in his State of the Union address Tuesday evening while Rover unfolds on Mars and proves we don't need manned missions to explore space.

The government is being held together with chewing gum and baling wire while Bush muses about a moon shot that would not occur until Jeb Bush's second term in office--if then. He'll strut down the aisle of the House chamber like a victorious war president while the Pentagon issues "stop-loss" orders to bar more than 200,000 members of the military from leaving even though they have fulfilled their service requirements.

"We've extended so many people, we look like we're conscripting people," says California Democratic Rep. Ellen Tauscher, who has 25 cosponsors for her bill to expand the military by 8 percent over three years. Fighting the Iraq insurgency is labor intensive, and the Pentagon doesn't have fresh recruits to reasonably rotate the units that are there. "It's not like you push a button," says Tauscher. "It takes 18 months to deliver the first new guy. If we don't start now, we'll be pulling people off chow lines and handing them a gun."

<snip>

Expanding the military by 8 percent across the board for the Army, Marines and Air Force, as Tauscher proposes, would not require any lowering of standards. "We have plenty of Americans willing to serve," says Tauscher. The military is already 20,000 people over the congressionally mandated caps set for the volunteer Army.

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. Bush could simply announce that we have already

sent people to mars and have a manned base on the moon. 51% of the people wouldn't know the difference anyway, and we could save the effort (not that any effort will ever be spent anyway).

[jpgray]

2. Here's an idea--how about a moratorium on imperialism?

How about it? Eh? Expanding the military means we'll just stretch it a little further next time.

[lcordero]

3. screw that! I hope that the dems take an ax to the moon and

mars shit. We already got enough problems on this planet.

[JohnyCanuck]

4. Taking people of the chow lines and handing them a gun?

"It's not like you push a button," says Tauscher. "It takes 18 months to deliver the first new guy. If we don't start now, we'll be pulling people off chow lines and handing them a gun."


Since it's Uncle Dick's Halliburton civilian employees running the chow lines these days, I guess they'd be handing guns to people who haven't even gone through boot camp. Oh well canon fodder is canon fodder I guess.