Britain’s military should be growing. It’s not. The Royal Air Force celebrated its 100th birthday last week with a gala program at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. No one does pomp better than the British, but the presence of the Queen’s Colour Squadron had a larger purpose: to solemnize the reformation of 617 Squadron, the famous Dambusters, now flying the stealthy F-35.Story here.
Those 16 fighter jets are among the best in the world. Given how few planes the RAF has, they’d better be. As a nation, Brexit Britain is stepping out of the shadow of the EU. But as a military power, it’s stepped into the shade.
The defense of a nation is about a lot of things. But ultimately, it takes money. One of Britain’s proudest boasts is that it’s one of the few members of NATO to meet the alliance’s target of spending a minimum of 2 percent of GDP on defense. By NATO’s figures, the U.K. spent 2.12 percent in 2017, more than any other member of NATO except Greece and the United States. But NATO’s accounting includes military pensions as defense spending. An alternative estimate, by the respected International Institute for Strategic Studies, found that Britain missed NATO’s minimum target in 2017 for the second year in a row—this time, by over $1 billion.
The rot set in years ago. As far back as 1998, in the second year of Tony Blair’s Labour government, a review of Britain’s defenses acknowledged that “the so-called ‘peace dividend’ from the ending of the Cold War has already been taken.” Yet while he waged wars in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Blair continued to cut the defense budget, which fell from 3.5 percent of GDP in 1996 to 2.3 percent in 2007.
That was lower than at any point in the 20th century except 1930, 1932, and 1933—the depths of the Great Depression.
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| pic via Bmashina Tumblr Page! |
#BREAKING: Abbas Araghchi, Iran's deputy foreign minister, says "The Iran nuclear deal is no longer sustainable for Iran in its present form, without regard to a US exit." (@dpa quoting ISNA news agency)— Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) April 30, 2018
When I write that CNN politics writer Chris Cillizza is the rankest assbrain in the Western Hemisphere, I am not being nice to him. When I write that God clowned Chris Cillizza before he was born by making him Chris Cillizza instead of a shit-eating maggot, I am being unkind. When I say that Chris Cillizza himself is the punchline to the cruelest work of absurdist comedy in the history of the fucking universe, and that the title of that work is On the Origin of Species, I am being mean. Likewise it probably is downright nasty for me to write that on the whole American society would benefit greatly by Chris Cillizza being fired out of a large cannon into an even larger cliff face. But I am not bullying Chris Cillizza. Categorically, I cannot do that.Read the rest here.
“Wolf’s treatment of Sanders was bullying,” Cillizza wrote on CNN’s website yesterday, because he is an obsequious slimeball even more slovenly with language than his forebears were in the dispensation of their chromosomes. He’s referring to the standup set Michelle Wolf, a comedian, performed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, somewhat at the expense of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a brazen, knowing, and hugely powerful enemy of the free press and deceiver of the public by trade. As you’ve surely read by now, Wolf joked that Sanders’s makeup—her “perfect smoky eye”—is made of the ashes of the facts she burns.
That’s about as gentle a way as anyone could come up with to lampoon the single most relevant fact about Sanders and what brought her to a station in life that would make her a reasonable subject of lines in a White House Correspondents’ Dinner monologue in the first place. A frank and honest description of who she is and what she does would be much more harsh: Every day, Sarah Huckabee Sanders plants herself, by choice, between the public and the facts of what’s being done at the very highest levels of American executive power, and does her damnedest to break and delegitimize the means by which the two are brought together.
