After eight years of the Bush administration where black was white, up was down, etc. we thought that the Obama administration would bring back logic, facts and reality.   But that was not to be.   Like the Clintonites, appeasing the GOP is the hallmark of this current DINO crew; also, continuing the Bushite suspension of logic and facts.

One of the most recent examples was Obama's integrity challenged leftover from the Bush ear, Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, who claimed that military spending wasn't a deficit problem.

Have you stopped laughing yet?

The essence of this "say, what????" moment was perfectly captured by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.

"The Hill, yesterday:

Secretary Gates: On deficit, Defense Department is 'not the problem'

Defense Secretary Robert Gates took a swipe on Tuesday at the proposal from the co-chairmen of President Obama's deficit commission to slash the Pentagon budget by $100 billion.

Gates said that such drastic cuts could devastate the military's force structure without any big impact on the nation's red ink.

"The truth of the matter is when it comes to the deficit, the Department of Defense is not the problem," Gates said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council on Tuesday. "I think in terms of the specifics they came up with, that is math not strategy."

"Inter-Press Service, May 28, 2010:

The United States continues to lead the world in defense spending, according to a new report released Thursday by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a U.S.-based non-partisan research organization.

In fact, the U.S. outspends Russia, the next highest spender, by more than 800 percent.

In 2008, the most recent year for which figures are available, the U.S. expenditure was 696.3 billion dollars, followed by Russia’s 86 billion and China’s 83.5 billion.

The U.S. defense budget is 15 times that of Japan, 47 times that of Israel, and nearly 73 times that of Iran.

Not only does U.S. spending dwarf that of other nations, but it has also grown in recent years.

The budget for fiscal year 2011 is 720 billion dollars, up 67 percent from 2001’s 432 billion, accounting for inflation.

"I don't have very many good things to say about the Bowles-Simpson deficit-cutting proposal, but its inclusion of surprisingly serious cuts in military spending (including the substantial reduction of American overseas bases) definitely qualifies as a good thing, for forcing such issues into the debate if nothing else. 

"President Dwight D. Eisenhower, "The Chance for Peace," speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953 (h/t Hume's Ghost):

" 'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.' "

"And, as always, few things underscore how far to the Right our political spectrum has shifted than reading something expressed by Eisenhower, who today would not be considered a moderate Republican but, at least in some instances, marginalized as a Far Leftist or, at best, a Crazy Pacifist-Isolationist."