I’m with Senator Webb on this. Far from talking about cutting foreign aid, which makes up only a miniscule share of the budget and has absolutely nothing to do with the our structural deficit problems (that’s almost all health care costs), we should be talking about how we can help our ally in its time of need.
I think we should be putting a lot more emphasis on what is going on in Japan. We have a situation over there where we have seen entire towns obliterated, where tens of thousands of people are dead or missing, where half a million people are living in shelters, where the power grid has been damaged and the ability of their normal institutional systems to handle that have really been affected.
They are an ally; they are a friend. We have done some good work with our military and in other areas, but I would hope that we could get that much higher on the radar screen in terms of what our government’s ability to assist the Japanese can be. People tend to think this is a rich country and therefore they can handle this, but when you have these multiple calamities, we really should be discussing that.
Unfortunately, Republicans like Eric Cantor don’t seem to care at all, while other leading “conservatives” like Rush Limbaugh think the whole situation’s a big joke. Thank goodness Republicans are only in charge of 1/2 of 1/3 of the government, as John BONEr said the other day. Unfortunately, that’s 1/2 of 1/3 too much control (plus, it’s wrong – effectively, Republicans have a lot of clout in the U.S. Senate, and also have a lot of power in the judiciary branch as well).
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