Anyone can opine on politics per se, but being able to relate politicking to policy, actions and results is a safer game but requires a lot of technical research (whereas as politic discussion allows a good deal of inference to serve as ‘evidence”, by its very nature).

I’ve been a military/technology wonk since I was kid, but haven’t appreciated the related politics until recently (the last decade).

As someone in the military biz onece said “never forget your gun was provided by the lowest bidder”–not entirely true but the subtext is the gun you have to rely on as a soldier may well be a piece of crap.

Comment by 5th Estate — March 11, 2008 @ 6:40 pm

Very intelligent post (your original one).
Things are not always so simple, cut and dried, good and evil.
There’s sometimes varying degrees of good and evil in all the players.

he doesn’t want those jobs in the US, because it will force more young people to enlist in the military.

McMaverick = the Draft

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080311/ap_on_el_pr/mccain_airbus

It so happens that some polticians will pocket lobbyist money but not return the expected favor (or an explicit one). As schizophrenic as McCain is, I don’t see Airbus’s after-the-fact contributions as being especially relevant–the deal was blown beforehand and there were no options other than Northrop/EADS.

There’s much more fat on McCains bones to chew than this.

Boeing had had the US military air-refueling ‘market’ sewn-up from the get-go (the Boeing 367-80 was built for the USAF to provide jet-powered cargo and refueling capability, the Boeing 707 airliner that was derived from the ‘Dash 80’ was a later commercial risk that paid-off handsomely).

Over the course of fifty years the number of large jet manufacturers has been considerably reduced, limiting the options for a replacement for the KC135.
For a couple of decades now economics and politics have presented a simple choice between Boeing and EADS/Airbus as suitable large-plane, large-scale manufacturers.

Boeing hedged its bets by bribing (by various means) USAF procurement officials to ensure the new contract would go to them. Once the scheme was discovered the Boeing CEO was ousted.

Apparently immediately following this breach of ethics, McCain “formally called for multiple bidders in the tanker deal.” Ilyushin could have offered their very economical and practical Il-76, but it was old and of course Russian. Northrop Grumman/Airbus was the only practical alternative and thus the default option.

Disregarding the political issues for the moment, the proposed Airbus tanker is a newer design (by nearly a decade) than the proposed Boeing 767 tanker. It also offers a greater fuel capacity and additional cargo capacity than the Boeing design. On paper it would appear that the Airbus tanker is a better value than the Boeing.

Boeing may feel it is being punished for the transgressions of a management team that has since been fired, which sounds like a pretty fair argument to me. But if the Airbus product is both technologically and practically superior to the Boeing product and is equivalent in cost, what argument do they have?
Political favoritism, that’s what! (Never mind that Boeing has relied on political favoritism since WWII).
McCain’s Northrop-Grumman/EADS contributions may look suspicious, but did he solicit them, has he passed any legislation in their favor on this issue and as I said, what was the alternative? This is one case where the money seems to have flowed after the fact, not before it. Had McCain campaigned FOR Airbus, or merely AGAINST a fait-accompli “bid” that was ‘competitive’ in name only? (As I said before there were only two practical choices). That’s something worth looking into, and it should be borne in mind that the Boeing deal was all but sealed until the bribing scandal was revealed.

Funnily enough there is a lot of noise being made on BOTH sides of the political aisle about outsourcing of not only manufacturing jobs to foreign companies, but the outsourcing of jobs with military and national security implications! Foreigners will have control of our military!

These ‘arguments’ are complete bollocks.

Boeing out-sources component work to many countries (as does Airbus, all the time). So too does Dell, Apple, HP and our car companies. EADS supplies extensive amounts of hardware, software and personnel to the US military and intelligence services.

The tie to McCain as stated thus far is tenuous It is worth investigating but it is also worth investigating Boeing’s interests and actions too, given that they appear to have lost a large contract they thought they had in the bag whilst the Republicans were still in power. They have every reason to throw a spanner in the works to either work the remaining GOP power in their favor or else establish some bona-fides for the likely incoming Democratic dominated 2009 administration by skewering McCain on this issue.

Boeing is seriously pitching this as a “national security” issue, when all they really care about is maintaining their taxpayer funded gravy train—never mind that the Airbus tanker is may well be a more practical choice for the USAF and for the tax-payer.

His lobbyists want more profit for their clients.

We have foreign lobbying firms working against our Nations true, best interests.

We need to go to a system of public financing and strict limits on individual donations. We have all sorts of limits on free speech (hate speech, libel, defamation, false advertising and so forth) when they are justified. Look, anyone is free to speak, but corporations and foreign interests are not people and never were never contemplated under the constitution. The silent quid pro quo’s of these donations are nothing more than influence buying (at worst) and purchasing access for special pleading (at best.) Contrary to what the Supreme Court has ruled in the past, money is not free speech.

Dumb Question: So are you saying that McCain exports good, high-paying american jobs to overseas ?

Dumb Question: So are you saying that McCain weakens our defenses by shifting control of our military machines from american soil to overseas ?

GO John GO!

FASCIST TRAITOR SCUM.