This paragraph from Yglesias got me thinking:
This is the oddity of American politics in 2010. To simply appropriate funds to give to poor foreigners (”foreign aid”) is hideously unpopular and politically unthinkable. To appropriate funds to give to state governments to keep the public sector operating is also politically untenable. But to appropriate the funds to build facilities for Americans but located in Afghanistan is easy.
In a nutshell: while we’re turning out the streetlights in Colorado and chopping up paved roads that states can no longer manage to pay up-keep on (and etc…), the Congress can always find plenty of money for our overseas adventures.
So: whoever Obama’s edition of Oliver North is, that person should build up some kind of sufficiently large yet sufficiently innocuous project that just needs doing over to Afghanistan. Money in hand, said North should then redirect that money to secret infrastructure improvements in this country. We can call it the Tuttle Initiative. Tuttlegate inevitably follows.
That this seems not only doable but probably the only way such a project gets done says a lot about our collapsing empire. Tap tap tap.
Lemkin 