The deciders decide

Purple Avenger at AOSHQ took notice of a snarky column by Hugh Bailey in the Connecticut Post, apparently indicating that the newspaper would no longer publish letters calling attention to the role of Democrats like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd in the mortgage meltdown. What caught my eye was a later paragraph in the column:

The notion that the tens of billions of dollars we spend killing people in Iraq could be better spent on schools and hospitals in this country is not radical. Huge majorities in this country support a robust social safety net, so that people who experience a run of misfortune don't lose everything. All other industrialized nations on the planet have some form of universal health care. None of this is controversial.

Now, first of all, P.J. O'Rourke once pointed out the fallacy of thinking that there is some kind of exchange center where we can go trade in fighter jets for social services. Whatever one's feelings about the Iraq war, it is not self-evident that deploying troops abroad automatically drains money from "schools and hospitals." Maybe it drains money from the federal departments of Education and HHS, but that's another proposition.

Yet since we're on the subject, how many of those "other industrialized nations" with universal health care can deploy so much as a single carrier task force or an infantry division? The Canadians and Swedes and Japanese have no effective military. We still have U.S. troops in Bosnia. Why? Because none of those European social democracies has enough firepower (or enough balls) to police their own backyard. If you expect the Belgians and Italians and Dutch to contribute meaningful military manpower to deterring dictators and preventing genocide, you're going to be bitterly disappointed.

As to the "huge majorities" who support the social safety net, one wonders if Mr. Bailey was whistling that majoritarian tune in 2002, when Republicans were riding high. And he closes with this:

Finally, about the penchant for using the word "liberal" as an epithet -- despite what your radio tells you, it's not an insult.

Mr. Bailey thus depicts his critics as mindless followers of talk-radio whereas he, Mr. Bailey, is entirely an independent thinker. Who is insulting who here?