{"id":198599,"date":"2007-10-25T22:12:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-26T03:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/10\/25\/snark-of-the-day-budget-edition\/"},"modified":"2007-10-25T22:12:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-26T03:12:00","slug":"snark-of-the-day-budget-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/10\/25\/snark-of-the-day-budget-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Snark of the Day, Budget Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

It should be noted that some budget budget wonks have uncovered a line item for a weapon to attack Iran<\/a>.(h\/t Attytood)<\/p>\n

It’s for a modification to the B2 Stealth bomber so that it can carry the 30,000 penetrating pound bomb<\/p>\n

Tucked inside the White House’s $196 billion emergency funding request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is an item that has some people wondering whether the administration is preparing for military action against Iran.<\/p>\n

The item: $88 million to modify B-2 stealth bombers so they can carry a newly developed 30,000-pound bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator, or, in military-speak, the MOP.<\/p>\n

The MOP is the the military’s largest conventional bomb, a super “bunker-buster” capable of destroying hardened targets deep underground. The one-line explanation for the request said it is in response to “an urgent operational need from theater commanders.”<\/p>\n

Hey, well, I’m sure the federal government has lots of uses for super “bunker-buster” bombs, such as, um, uh, na….<\/p>\n

“You’d use it on Natanz,” said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. “And you’d use it on a stealth bomber because you want it to be a surprise. And you put in an emergency funding request because you want to bomb quickly<\/span><\/span>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is no reason to put this in an emergency request unless you have a target, and you want to hit it soon<\/span>.<\/p>\n

BTW, two snaps up to Will Bunch for this comment, “I’ve long been in the camp that the Cheney-Bush administration isn’t really as incompetent as it looks, that most of the worst stuff they do is 100 percent intentional. Putting your air-attack plans in a budget bill, however, is actually pretty incompetent. Hopefully they’ll get rid of this before Hillary can enthusiastically vote for it<\/span>.<\/span>“<\/p>\n

Now I have to clean off my screen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It should be noted that some budget budget wonks have uncovered a line item for a weapon to attack Iran.(h\/t Attytood) It’s for a modification to the B2 Stealth bomber so that it can carry the 30,000 penetrating pound bomb Tucked inside the White House’s $196 billion emergency funding request for the wars in Iraq …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1008,1002,1034,1025,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-defense-procurement","category-good-writing","category-iran","category-technology","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198599"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}