Dick “Dick” Cheney does not approve of the plan to downsize the military because obviously having a larger military is more important than feeding people. Or so I gather.
“I’ve obviously not been a strong supporter of Barack Obama. But this really is over the top,” Cheney said. “It does enormous long-term damage to our military, and they act as though it’s highway spending you can turn on and off.” [...]
“[Obama would] much rather spend the money on food stamps than he would on a strong military or support for our troops,” he said.
Cheney says that as if it’s a bad thing.
Maybe he isn’t aware that an alarming number of veterans and military families rely on food stamps.
A Defense Department review released last year showed that military families were more reliant on food stamps in 2013 than in any previous year, with over $100 million in food stamp spending at military grocery stores. “Food stamp usage at the stores has more than quadrupled since 2007 as the recession compounded the already difficult financial situation faced by military families,” ThinkProgress’ Deputy Economics editor Alan Pyke wrote last week.
This could be reading too much into it, but I’ll go out on a limb and opine that Cheney wasn’t merely deriding the value food stamps; he was deriding the president as a so-called “food stamp president” in the same racially-codified manner that Newt Gingrich referred to him.
It’s not as if Dick Cheney knows much about proper military spending.
Troops sent into Iraq were woefully ill-equipped and unprepared and billions of dollars were wasted, sometimes even vanishing into thin air or into someone’s pockets at Cheney’s former company.
“Support the troops” is bumper-sticker tripe for disingenuous gasbags.