Steve King is Still a Hypocrite!

Yeah, what else is new?

Strangely enough, the Sioux City Journal alerted me to a story that points out another example of the sort of rank hypocrisy concerning spending and spending priorities practiced by so-called “fiscal conservatives” such as Steve King.

Yesterday (10/20/05), the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a new report entitled “Reserve Forces: Army National Guard’s Role, Organization, and Equipment Need to be Reexamined” (available on the GAO website). In its report, the GAO found that: “As of July 2005, the Army National Guard had transferred over 101,000 equipment items to units deployed overseas, exhausting inventories of some critical items, such as radios and generators, in non-deployed units. Non-deployed units now face significant shortfalls [of equipment].” That is, non-deployed units such as those remaining behind in the States to cope with natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, and whose efforts are now hampered by the abovementioned lack of vital equipment!

But what really got my attention was the following sentence, in which the GAO highlighted yet another example of the Department of Defense’s financial malfeasance. Some 64,000 pieces of equipment valued at over $1.2 billion has been left behind for forces deploying later, the GAO noted, and of that amount the U.S. military “cannot account for over half of these items and does not have a plan to replace them” [emphasis mine]! At my place of employment, they expect me to keep receipts and account for the supplies I use. My employer also expects me to use equipment responsibly. Is it asking too much to request the U.S. military do the same? I don’t expect miracles, but losing half one’s equipment valued at how many tens of millions of dollars seems excessive to me.

And I ask again, where’s our lunatic local Representative Steve King when such egregious government waste is exposed? Still AWOL. Got to make sure we don’t waste money on the desperate and dying in New Orleans, I guess, but let’s just piss away our national prestige and wealth in the Bush Administration’s Iraq folly. Steve King, loyal foot-soldier to the end, will likely not utter a peep about this actual example of the government throwing good money after bad (he’d rather ‘tilt at windmills’ over disaster relief spending).

PS- Three cheers for Dave Yoder of the Sioux City Journal who yesterday wrote a superb editorial eviscerating King for his “McCarthy as hero” comment!!! The heck with McCarthy, Yoder is my hero!

Peace!
Historian