Love American Style

You just gotta love this article by David Michael Green. Excerpt:

"I guess it won’t be a huge surprise to anybody that the US spends more on ‘defense’ than any other country in the world. Maybe that’s not so completely absurd, given that we have the third largest population on the planet. (At least it’s not entirely out of line if you set aside the slightly inconvenient fact that the two larger countries are about four times bigger than we are). But here’s the truly scary part: The United States not only outspends every other country in the world on military goodies, it outspends ALL other countries of the world. Combined. That’s right. Take all 190-plus countries out there and add together their defense budgets and you still won’t equal America’s alone. What’s more, that doesn’t even include the $100 billion or so that we’re dropping each year in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the additional costs in veterans’ (so-called) care, munitions replacement and economic losses we have been hemorrhaging for those wars, and will continue to, for decades to come, estimated to run up toward two trillion bucks total. (Oh, and did I mention that one-sixth of our population doesn’t have healthcare coverage? Never mind. I’m sure those are completely unrelated facts.) Anyhow, does that sound like a peace-loving country to you? We love it so much that we outspend nearly 200 other countries in the world – combined! – in buying shit for war? And think about this for a second: How absolutely disastrous does your diplomacy have to get so that you need to be able to fight off every other country of the world, all at once?!"

Read the rest here.