The Loved One

I’m not sure you’ve if seen the movie “The Loved One”. It’s a black comedy classic from 1965. I had to discover it on TMC because I was obviously too young to see it in the theatre when it came out.  It’s got some really terrific cameos by all kinds of people but the major stars are Jonathan Winters–who I adored as a kid–and Robert Morse.  Liberace is a casket salesman and Winters has a role as the Blessed Reverend who runs a mortuary, a cult, and is always scheming ways to get richer.  The movie sends up so many things that it’s hard to single out just one.  There’s journalists and businessmen and religious cults and the military.

One of my favorite scenes happens when a bunch of colonels are drug into the casket show room to see if there’s anything they like.  The owners of Whispering Glen Mortuary and Cemetery–run by the Blessed Reverend–figure that the Army in 1965 will need a lot of their caskets and services, right? After some weird looks all around, the caskets are found to contain scantily clad young women and then, of course, the colonials just have a lot of fun ala 1965 go go music.  Such is the world of military procurement in 1965 black comedy movies during the early Vietnam era.

So, I’m adding a few tidbits from the movie so you can get a taste of the oddball comedy and if you want to stick with something lighter than what I’m about to write on.  Rod Steiger stars as an embalmer called Mr Joy Boy that has to be one of the most bizarre characters and performances that I’ve ever seen.  I’ve put a clip of that in the  you tube down at the bottom. 

However, back to the idea of military procurement and scantily clad women. What I really want to talk about is how much money we throw away on our military.   Plus, shouldn’t we really be questioning the judgement of some of these generals that are making big decisions for us?  This scene from a vintage black comedy reminds me of the current crop of folks that have control over military spending and their suppliers that really want to make money off of them and their egos.

Now, I’m beginning to think that I should’ve included a clip from The Entourage, but anyway …

The commanders who lead the nation’s military services and those who oversee troops around the world enjoy an array of perquisites befitting a billionaire, including executive jets, palatial homes, drivers, security guards and aides to carry their bags, press their uniforms and track their schedules in 10-minute increments. Their food is prepared by gourmet chefs. If they want music with their dinner parties, their staff can summon a string quartet or a choir.

The elite regional commanders who preside over large swaths of the planet don’t have to settle for Gulfstream V jets. They each have a C-40, the military equivalent of a Boeing 737, some of which are configured with beds.

Since Petraeus’s resignation, many have strained to understand how such a celebrated general could have behaved so badly. Some have speculated that an exhausting decade of war impaired his judgment. Others wondered if Petraeus was never the Boy Scout he appeared to be. But Gates, who still possesses a modest Kansan’s bemusement at Washington excess, has floated another theory.

“There is something about a sense of entitlement and of having great power that skews people’s judgment,” Gates said last week.

I’m beginning to think that oddball comedies have nothing on the life styles of the rich and clusterfilled. But really, there’s a serious lack of congressional oversight when it comes to military spending still.   We can’t talk about cutting discretionary spending without looking at the function that takes up the majority of the funds, can we?

Even Senator Tom Coburn — a hard-right Republican from Oklahoma — knows that much of this Pentagon spending is wasteful and completely unrelated to our modern security needs. He released a report a few days ago that laid out some of this wasteful spending. Here are a few highlights, from the Washington Times:

• $300,000 spent by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to fund Brown University’s research into archaeopteryx, the 150-million-year-old early bird, in which the researchers determined the creature likely had black feathers.

• An Office of Naval Research research project that helped spawn Caffeine Zone 2, an iPhone application that tells people how to schedule their coffee breaks.

• $1.5 million to develop a special new roll-up beef jerky, which Mr. Coburn said was funded by taking money out of a weapons program.

• $100,000 for a 2011 workshop on interstellar space travel that included a session entitled “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?” The session probed how Christian theology would apply in the event of the discovery of aliens.

L’affaire du Patreus appears to be symptomatic of the overindulgence of America’s Top Brass.

Petraeus cultivated his fame by grasping, before most of his comrades, how the narrative of modern warfare is shaped not just on the battlefield but among the chattering class back home. He invited book authors to accompany him, granted frequent interviews to journalists, fostered close relationships with Washington think tanks and embraced political leaders on both sides of the aisle. When President George W. Bush needed a savior for the foundering war in Iraq, he turned to Petraeus, making him the frontman for the troop surge in Baghdad. In the first six months of 2007, Bush mentioned Petraeus’s name 150 times in speeches.

Petraeus did not disappoint. Violence dropped in Iraq after he became the top commander there. He returned home as a celebrity. In 2009, he was asked to flip the coin at the Super Bowl.

He became an A-list guest at Washington parties. His stardom, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a collective guilt among civilians disconnected from the conflicts all helped to raise the profile for his fellow generals. It wasn’t just Jill Kelley, the Tampa woman who cultivated close relationships with him and other generals, including Gen. John R. Allen, the top commander in Afghanistan, by throwing lavish parties at her million-dollar house. Hostesses around the nation delighted at the presence of commanders in full-dress uniforms at social events.

The adulation fit their lifestyle.

“Being a four-star commander in a combat theater is like being a combination of Bill Gates and Jay-Z — with enormous firepower added,” said Thomas E. Ricks, the author of “The Generals,” a recently published history of American commanders since World War II.

 It’s about time we hit the reset button for the Pentagon.

One long ground war is over, another is ending, and there is no prospect of (or stomach for) new wars of occupation. No new cosmic threat has arisen, much as hawks have tried to promote China, our biggest lender and one of our biggest trading partners, into that role. And, to cap it all, your budget is headed for that dread fiscal cliff. In the absence of a budget bargain between Congress and the president, half of the automatic spending cuts that take effect in January will come from your domain — almost 10 percent applied evenly across all accounts. This is widely viewed with alarm by military experts in both parties who see it, rightly, as budgeting by meat ax. So, then, what’s the alternative?

This country accounts for more than 40 percent of the money spent on defense worldwide. We spend as much as the next 14 countries on the top-spender list, combined, and most of them are American allies. And that’s just the Defense Department. It doesn’t include the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons program, the C.I.A.’s drone franchise, the NASA satellites, the benefits provided by Veterans Affairs, and so on.

Here’s a reminder of how out-of-balance we are with the rest of the world when it comes to Military spending.

The first figure compares officially reported (and incomplete) US defense spending for 2011 ($739.3 billion) to the rest of the top ten defense spenders (also as officially reported): They are China, the UK, France, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Germany, India and Brazil–in that order. See the budget numbers at the link: note that not one breaks the $100 billion threshold, let alone coming anywhere close to the US. Added all together, the nine come to roughly two-thirds of the US amount, showing not balance but imbalance.

However, the contraposition of US spending to these nine is a bit odd; it suggests there is some sort of analytical comparison to be made between the US and these nine countries, other than that they are the next nine in spending levels. It would make more sense to compare US spending to that of opponents, or at least potential opponents. Assuming for the moment that China and Russia are “potential opponents” (an assumption often made by Cold Warriors with a hangover or others with no great respect for the ability of US policy makers to learn to live with regional powers or even a future superpower), the combined total for China ($89.8 billion) and Russia ($52.7 billion) comes to $142.5 billion.

Consider how puny that $142.5 billion is compared to the US’s $739.3 billion. Showing that relationship in a bar graph would almost seem to be a conscious act in diminishing China and Russia or bloating US spending. That, nonetheless, is the appropriate comparison. Moreover, adjusting it for the defense budgets of Syria, Iran, North Korea, Somalia or anyone else won’t change a thing. Not one of the latter breaks the $10 billion barrier, and if you add the defense related spending not officially reported (including for the US), the basic relationship in these spending totals will not likely change: The US spends roughly five times what these other countries spend.

In other words, the US defense budget is not just dominant; it is operating at a level completely independent of the perceived threat. In the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy sized itself to the fleets of Britain’s two most powerful potential enemies; America’s defense budget strategists declare it will be “doomsday” if we size to anything less than five times China and Russia combined

So, at the end of the movie “The Loved One”, the mortuary gang are supposedly going to shoot an “American Hero” into space in a casket that will circle the world eternally.  The American Hero is an ex-astronaut named Condor.  This is the Blessed Reverend’s latest get rich scheme. In the usual comedy of errors, we find out the American Hero had died falling off a bar stool dead drunk in a strip club.  The anti-hero Robert Morse gets Joyboy to send up Aimée Thanatogenos– the young woman you see in the clip below–and Condor is assigned to a pet cemetery.

So, compare that plot to L’Affaire du Patreaus where we met friend of Patreaus Jill Kelly who has run a phoney cancer charity into bankruptcy while trying to parley her honorary consulate int consulting for $80 million dollars.  I’ve gone from thinking this entire thing reminds me of a life time move, to a house wives of the pentagon reality to show, to … well, now it’s a screw ball comedy of errors with billions of dollars at stake.

Adam Victor, president of New York’s TransGas Development Systems, told the New York Daily News he began meeting with Kelley after learning of her post and her close ties with now former CIA director David Petraeus. Victor hoped Kelley could lobby South Korea’s president with regards to a $4 billion energy project.

“She said, ‘My position is honorary, so I don’t get paid by the South Korean government. But I’m perfectly allowed to get paid as a consultant,'” Victor says. At the end of a week-long negotiation, Kelley requested a 2-percent fee — $80 million — and the whole thing careened to a stop. “I immediately said, ‘Whoa!’ The Goldman Sachs of the world get 1.5 percent,” Victor said. “She wanted a counter-offer. We declined, and said do not make any more contacts on our behalf.”

Well, it’s still a Mad, Mad, Mad world, isn’t it? That’s not even beginning to mention the morality of what we’re doing in the world these days with all that brass, those drones, and those boys that really seem to make some bad decisions.

This about sums up my thoughts for the day: “Benghazi is a tragedy in search of a scandal; the Petraeus affair is a scandal in search of a tragedy.”