First, it was Tom Coburn, R- Muskogee, with his denouncement of Republican efforts to gut the Affordable Care Act (a law they’ve tried — and failed — to overturn a whopping 40 times).
Now it’s Jim Inhofe, R-Tulsa, who is taking an unlikely stance by opposing U.S. force in the Syrian conflict. But it’s not because he’s opposed to war or anything. It’s because, well, we just don’t have the money.
“We have a financial crisis in our military,” Inhofe said in a statement. “We have a starving military.”
To Inhofe’s credit, he has been consistent in his opposition of the defense cuts, which accounted for onehalf of everyone’s favorite congressional achievement: the sequester.
That said, Inhofe was far less reluctant to break that military bank for the Iraq War, a somewhat expensive venture in its own right.
“The difference is we were a very healthy military at that time,” Inhofe told CNN’s John Berman.
“We
had the assets. We had the resources to go anywhere that we wanted to
go to do the things that we felt in our mind were right.”
Translation:
putting trillions of dollars on the government credit card to pay for a
largely ineffective war was OK ten years ago. Now? Not so much.
