At its best, satire can reveal truths that have remained obscured, often deliberately so. Such is the case with Andy Borowitz’ column about the real damage that the miniscule cuts in defense spending as part of the sequester deal will do to American policy:
The spending cuts mandated by the sequester may hamper the United States’s ability to invade countries for absolutely no reason, a Pentagon spokesman warned today.
The Pentagon made this gloomy assessment amid widespread fears that the nation’s ability to wage totally optional wars based on bogus pretexts may be in peril…
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R—S.C.) agreed about the catastrophic effects of the Pentagon cuts, telling reporters, “The ability of the United States to project its military power in an arbitrary and totally capricious way must never be compromised.”
Unfortunately, we all know that in’t really true. Even if we cut the defense budget in half, that would not stop the government from trumping up fake reasons to go to war. Hell, they’d probably do it specifically to get more money from Congress. And they can get away with this because the American people always fall for the pre-war marketing campaign and always cheer on those wars, at least for a while (and that’s all that matters). If they can sell people on the idea of invading Vietman or Iraq, countries that posed no possible threat to us whatsoever, they can sell anything.