Remember What Pol Pot Said...

More wingnuts and their enablers are out there describing the Obama-Gates increase in the military budget as a "cut." I've already said my peace on this, but it's certainly interesting to see this Wall Street Journal op-ed from some AEI functionaries invoke the founder of the KKK to defend their position:

However, warfare is not a human activity that directly awards virtue. Nor is it a perfectly calculable endeavor that permits a delicate "balancing" of risk. More often it rewards those who arrive on the battlefield "the fustest with the mostest," as Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest once put it. If Mr. Gates has his way, U.S. forces will find it increasingly hard to meet the Forrest standard.

I should hope we do find it hard to meet the Forrest standard! In fact, the nature of our President's origin practically ensures it!

I tire of arguing from the "no, it's really an increase" position as if that's a good thing, because I don't agree with that position. But, it's not hard to note the facts. There are no budget cuts to the military. There OUGHT to be, and considering the uproar over slighter increases they might as well have made cuts, but they didn't. The authors tweak Gates for saying that the budget talks were "almost exclusively influenced by factors other than simply finding a way to balance the books," but that's pretty clear from the result.

It's also amusing to see the self-styled "fiscal conservatives" go apeshit that the military budget isn't increasing as fast as they'd like.