FRED THOMPSON’S WORLDVIEW

The libertarian Cato Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter has raised serious questions about Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson's proposal in a speech at the Citadel in South Carolina to increase U.S. defense spending by as much as another $100-billion a year– bringing the Pentagon budget to $600-billion a year, while cutting Social Security benefits by as much as 25 percent over the next three decades.

Carpenter says Thompson’s approach to guarantee 4.5 percent of the U.S. economy to military purposes, and to cut Social Security benefits by one-fourth by the year 2040, turns proper budgeting on its head.

“Instead of crafting a defense strategy and then determining how much we need to spend to implement it, Thompson picks an arbitrary budget figure. He would apparently decide on policy priorities later.

“To the extent he thinks about the specifics of security strategy at all, Thompson uncritically accepts all of Washington's current defense commitments. But there are numerous obligations that reek of obsolescence. Why, for example, does the United States need to keep nearly 100,000 troops in Europe more than 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

“Thompson’s defense proposal is a case study in faulty thinking about important security issues.

“Similarly, why do we need to retain our security commitment to South Korea? When we made that pledge, South Korea was an impoverished country incapable of defending itself, and the Korean peninsula was only one theater in America's global struggle against communism.

“Today, South Korea has twice the population and an economy 40 times bigger than that of its North Korean rival. It seems absurd on its face to continue subsidizing the defense of such a prosperous and capable country -- especially when it is no longer part of a global security rivalry.

“Yet there is no hint in Thompson's defense manifesto that he is willing to consider terminating—or even downsizing—such obsolete commitments. Setting military spending at so high a level spares policymakers from having to make decisions about priorities. Instead, it encourages complacent, lazy thinking about strategy.

“The second crucial pillar of Thompson's proposal—the million-member ground force— may be even more worrisome than the overall spending figure. Due to its geographic position and technological prowess, America needs to focus on air and naval power to protect its legitimate security interests. A large ground force makes little strategic sense. The United States is not likely to wage a ground war against China, Russia or any other conceivable major strategic adversary.

“Consequently, a million-member ground force is superfluous, unless Thompson is contemplating involving the United States in additional Iraq-style nation-building missions. But that is the last thing America needs to do. We have already spent a tragic amount of blood and treasure—nearly 3,900 casualties and well over $500 billion—in the Iraq misadventure. For the United States to pursue similar missions in the future would be an exercise in foreign policy masochism.

“Thompson's defense proposal is a case study in faulty thinking about important security issues. Throwing money at the Pentagon, complacently accepting a host of obsolete commitments to free-riding allies and embracing the folly of nation building is not what the next administration needs to do.”

What is Thompson’s response?

None, except his down-home Tennessee aw-shucks don’t know what to say. Do we want this from the White House for eight years following George W. Bush? I think we can do better.

Colin McNickle, editorial page editor of Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper, is similarly skeptical:

“Fred Thompson appears not to think as highly of the First Amendment as he does the Second. He voted for both the McCain-Feingold and Shays-Meehan campaign finance ‘reform’ measures -- gross perversions and restrictions of free speech rights.

“Government should regulate politics, Thompson believes -- what is said, when it's said and how much of it can be said. It's outrageous.

“Only the Sedition Act of 1798 -- making it a crime for anyone to write or publish "any false, scandalous and malicious writing against the president or the government in general" -- had a more chilling effect on political discourse.

“Clearly, Congress is constitutionally forbidden from legislating on matters involving free speech: "Congress shall make no law... ." Yet Fred Thompson was, and apparently remains, convinced otherwise.

“Feel free to scream.

“How can Thompson be so right on so many issues but so blind on this issue? It is an ideological inconsistency of such import that it could -- and perhaps it should -- scotch Thompson's exploratory candidacy before any formal Independence Day kickoff.

“Indeed, and as great orator Daniel Webster once said, ‘Inconsistencies of opinion, rising from changes of circumstances, are often justifiable.’ But not this one. For the Constitution says what it means and means what it says, no matter the meddling of its temporary legislative and judicial custodians.

“If the First Amendment is so easy for Fred Thompson to rationalize, what amendment, what article, what section will follow?

“Call the maintenance department. Back to storage goes the Republican throne; back to the display case goes the GOP crown.”

There you have it.

Fred Thompson was lazy in the U.S. Senate, lazy as a television actor on Law and Order, and would be a lazy president who has said he would just throw billions more dollars at the Pentagon in order to drag the United States into continued conflagration all over the world.

Is that what we want? You decide.