U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Samuel Rogers (Wikipedia)
The people of the great state of Kansas are slightly less enthusiastic about cutting federal spending than they were yesterday.
It could have been the neighbors that were crying today. That would be us in Missouri.
It turns out that one of Kansas’ previously prized corporate citizens—the Boeing Company—is using the occasion of upcoming cuts in the U.S. Department of Defense to justify closing a plant in Wichita that will cost the region 2,160 jobs. Particularly galling to politicians there is that they feel double-crossed by the company after having just done what politicians do, which is shill for it in the halls of Congress.
Lay down with dogs, and you get fleas. Lay down with military contractors, and you get jobs—which makes for wonderful political photo-ops, not to mention juicy campaign contributions—or, on rare occasions, you don’t. And then you think they are dogs.
This is one of those rare occasions.
What’s amusing, if you don’t live in Kansas, is that what’s happening to Kansas is precisely what the Tea Party types who dominate Kansas politics have demanded: They want a smaller government. They want a powerful business community and eviscerated labor unions. They want free markets. And they want it now.
So here comes the Department of Defense, doing what it absolutely should do as the occupation/war in Iraq ends and the prospect of incomprehensible federal deficits remains. That would be to cut spending.
And here comes Boeing, in full victimization mode as to how such spending cuts might impair its commerce in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction (my term, not theirs), and voila, you have a terrible blow to the very people who believe in their hearts that crazy federal deficits will guarantee the starvation of their grandchildren.
People in St. Louis and Missouri shouldn’t be smug about this. Just this week, our politicians were praising to the heavens the glorious news that our Boeing employees will be gainfully employed in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction (my term, not theirs) to be shipped to an Arab dictatorship that despises and boycotts Israel and—according to the U.S. Department of State Department—practices Sharia law, persecutes women, intimidates journalists, locks up political dissenters, and is otherwise more than a bit lacking in the human-rights department.
But Saudi Arabia is our friend. And their business is very good for Boeing, which is a very important company to us, just like it was to Wichita.
Until today.
Now, let’s return you to the election debates, where I’m sure you’ll be hearing a lot about cutting the size of government and defending freedom around the globe.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Commentary by Ray Hartmann
