How Republicans Let You Know They Aren't Serious About Cutting the Defense Budget

Also: The nepo-baby distraction.

Pieter Breughel the Elder, Tower of Babel, 1563.

Washington has a dialect all its own. When a Republican has absolutely no idea what he wants to cut from the federal budget, he says he will eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse.” It’s always in that order. It’s never “fraud, abuse, and waste” or “waste, abuse, and fraud” or “abuse, fraud and waste.” It’s got to be “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That’s Washingtonspeak for “I’m really not being serious.” If he said it any other way the message might not get through.

The new way for Republicans to signal that they aren’t being serious when they say they want to cut the federal budget is to say they will eliminate “woke spending at the Pentagon.” In my latest, I try to calculate how much that might conceivably save. My best guess is $5 million, in a defense budget that exceeds $800 billion. I also point out that at least some of that much-maligned “woke” spending is tactically advantageous on the battlefield, citing the example of electric motorcycles, which the Ukrainian Army prizes because they’re really, really quiet.

You can read my piece here.

Earlier this week, I succumbed to the temptation to write about TikTok outrage over “nepo” (Hollywood nepotism) babies and its profound irrelevance to the problem of unequal opportunity in the United States. Among other things, I pointed out that Johann Strauss II and Martin Luther King, Jr., were nepo babies whose accomplishments (in King’s case, on behalf of equal opportunity) outstripped that of their celebrity parents. Their contributions to humankind were so great that only an idiot would actually call them nepo babies. The childish obsession with trying to achieve perfect fairness at the individual level, which is impossible, rather than trying to expand equality at the societal level, which is possible, will soon lead the Supreme Court to abolish affirmative action. That will be a huge loss for economic opportunity in America. You can read my nepo-baby piece and weep here.