One thing that struck me in your article was the point that:

“The chief weapon of our current enemy . . . is the homemade roadside bomb, triggered by a cell phone or garage-door opener.”

It made me think of Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPG’s), another popular weapon in Iraq, and a story on NBC Sept. 5th.

The story covered a defense company in Israel that has developed a defense system for RPGs that is ready for operation on the battle field.

However, the U.S. Army has already paid $70 million to a defense company named Raytheon to develop a similar RPG defense system.

Do to the Army’s previous business deal with Raytheon the Army is willing to wait another 5 years before deploying an RPG defense system in operational combat.

Even though one is ready now?

How many lives will be lost because of this decision?

i dont know why matt is complaining, this is standard operating procedure for big govt in general…

but besides hating on just the f-22, why not look into the massive fraud and abuse in social security, welfare, medicare/medicaid, etc. where congress actually funds the monetary fraud and abuse, and expects it to happen

Just more examples of our Elected Mafia at work, fuckers! What we need is something along the lines of what happened in Thailand today. Shit, I’ll join the Army if that happens.

yo, “f-22=the same thing as welfare” lady,

matts point is that corrupt as governmental programs maybe at least medicare for sick old people is a hell of a lot more useful than the technological advantage of a f-22 over an f-16 when were just gone sell these updated same jets to pakistan anyway.

Our priorities in America are so far beyond f*cked up, we don’t know what we’re doing anymore.
As Cyrus points out, we have a weapon that can help our troops now, but the Army instead says “No, let’s wait 5 years.” Our soldiers don’t even have proper body armor. And now, we’ll waste more money on overpriced, underacheiving jets paid for at the expense of programs helping the poor, elderly and needy. What the f*ck is going on???

As dismayed as I was at Katie Courick’s choice to lead off with pictures of Suri Cruise, I’m not sure Rolling Stone can, in good conscience, criticize her for it. This magazine, for all it’s political posturing, is a tool of the entertainment industry. Without people’s undying interest in celebrities Rolling Stone would die. You can argue all you want that the magazine serves a higher cultural purpose by writing about music, but how do you explain all the stories about Paris Hilton (well before her album was even concieved of) and other non-musical celebrities?

I applaud the author for trying to shed more light on what is admittedly an important story, but the backbiting comes off as self-righteous and hypocritical.

well, it’s SNAFU (situation normal, all fu@ked up). Hey, Jack Abramoff taught us that campaign contributions and donations to PACs and specially set up ‘charities’ are the currency of corruption. Yet no one learned and no one does anything about it.
Then the GOP sends its goons out to the media outlets to smear anything not in line with their BS as propaganda or fabrications.

I guess it won’t hurt us any if poor people become desperate enough to start robbing and kidnaping the rich as they do in Brazil and other countries where the difference between the rich and the poor is huge.

I guess they can use their brand new jets to bomb the poor neighborhoods to get rid of them, those people always all vote democrat anyways.

I remember some important personage in history saying something like ‘it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven’. I bet they are working on a huge needle with an eye about 6 foot wide and 9 foot tall.

Hey it’s standard operating procedure, let’s let them keep doing it. nobody cares anyway.

Great article.

The only way to stop this kind of thievery is public financing of elections and making corporate contributions to politicians illegal. For a tax of $20 a person a year, we could completely knock the special interests and defense contractors tool for currupting the system out of their hands.

correction, instead of $20, make it .01%

Best Taibbi article so far at the new (low) post. It works because he uses actual numbers / names / dates / places to back key points. Taibbi confines his sharp moral invective to a few broad summary paragraphs, where it’s most effective. If Taibbi works harder and consumes less alcohol he might keep this gig for a while.

Despite all of this, I’m still not selling my Lockheed-Martin options until Uncle Dick drops dead of a heart attack.

Ah Shit,
the way this is going you know after the next budget they’re going to send Marines in to legal aid offices nationwide, force us to line up, count off and then grind every third one of us into MREs for the troops.
By Rove’s Hammer, what savings!

Uncle Jed Clampett, when average citizens with no net worth and no political power start talking about ‘banning’ and ‘outlawing’ and ‘regulating’ the political arena, the uber-wealthy simply authorize their CEO’s to give more cash to pundits who will decry you as ’shrill’.

Time for hillbillies to graduate to the 21st century.

you just exposed the problem my dear nephew. the people have no political power. rather strange for a government ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’, don’t you think?

you mean pundits like Geraldo and Novak and Liddy? Nobody really listens to those goons anyway.

ever watch the daily show, at least sometimes people have a voice. just not in the political arena.

How about we create a bill on the web, get peoples votes on it, when it reaches 1M votes, lets send it to congress and see if it picks up sponsors. hopefully it wont get ammended into oblivion with loopholes.

Well Uncle Jed, I’ll let Taibbi say it all. From the New York Press on May 8, 2003 (’May Day, May Day’): “Welcome to the U.S.S.A. – the United Soviet States of America… The proletariat finally has its dictatorship.” It’s too late for people power – just ask Rupert Murdoch and Hilary Clinton.

I’m off to do the only thing a country-bred 6th-grade-educated redneck is good for in the good old U-S-of-Bushlandia: join the double-naught spy corps.

Jethro—

Are you Matt?

No Mike, I’m not Matt. But there’s lots of ‘Matt Taibbis’ out here. Mostly, like Matt, we’ve spent years living outside the US and can cut through a lot of the ‘Us or Them’ rhetoric that Americans left inside the prison homeland are shackled to.

Katie Couric is an mindless news robot.

“why not look into the massive fraud and abuse in social security, welfare, medicare/medicaid”

Oh Please Sasquatch, yer killing me!
First of all welfare is no more, Clinton killed it (changing the face of Democrats as we know them). Besides that, we could do a complete audit of SS and MC costing millions in accounting fees and not uncover enough fraud to cover one “Blackwater Security”, not to mention Halliburton. The vast amounts of wealth are being siphoned off at the top, my furry friend. The fraud at the bottom is mere chump-change.

God, what a dirty game. Thanks for the plane truth about the F-22. Please keep telling it just as simply and directly as you have. What a scam, but then, this is the US, and Bush is the President. What should we expect from political decisions made by those elected representatives who are so beholden to special interests and so disloyal to their own constituents. Like you said, it’s a fucking shame. I can only vote Democratic for the rest of my life, but so what? What’s going to change?

I agree with eddie torres. FINALLY the M.T. stops smearing all who disagree with him as being mentally retarded and/or having been paid off by George Bush and the DLC. . . and writes about something worth genuine outrage.

Somehow, we’ve gotten to the point where “efficiency” in social spending (aka slashing everything you think won’t get noticed by the press) is ten times more important than efficiency in military spending. Example: the war in Iraq. Yes, Mr. Taibbi, I will continue to be one of those “careerist shitheads” you hate so much who believe Iraq to be a good idea executed badly–but that means it could have been executed without a.) no-bid contracts, b.) political cronies in key positions, c.) a neo-con planning mentality that assumes Baghdad can be run in the same way as Jackson, Mississippi, d.) an infinite faith in Ahmad Chalabi to take care of everything, and e.) a refusal to change your strategy even in the slightest.

And even without all of that, you believe Iraq would have turned out EXACTLY the same way it has today? Wow. Three cheers for determinist thinking.

My point is, however, that the way Iraq was run and the F-22 scandal you detail in your column are part of the same puzzling tendency of the national government nowadays: to hold social programs to a standard about 10,000,000 times higher than they do military programs. Not cool.