"The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." --Jesus
"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious" --George Orwell
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." --F. Scott Fitzgerald
Monday, February 05, 2007
The Cost Of Freedom
"It is incredible that the ridiculous argument that these wars are fiscally unsustainable has worked its way into the national dialogue. I had dinner with a well-informed and (but?) fairly lefty cousin a couple of weeks ago, and she cited the huge cost of the war among her various reasons for opposing it. I made the (to me) obvious point that defense spending was actually still very low by post-war standards and a fraction of the level that prevailed even in the 1980s. Her response: Why doesn't anybody know that? Well, perhaps NPR doesn't dwell on that sort of thing. The New York Times certainly doesn't."