Andy Rooney commentary on 60 minutes ...

Just sent this by a friend of mine in Dallas. I didn't
see the show, but it sounds like something he'd say/write ...

Charlie

================

CBS) The following is a weekly 60 Minutes commentary by CBS News
correspondent Andy Rooney. It was first broadcast Oct. 2, 2005.

I'm not really clear how much a billion dollars is but the United States
-
our United States - is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war
in
Iraq that we never should have gotten into.

We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today.

Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?

Now we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way our government pays for a
lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China.

Another way the government is planning to pay for the war and the
hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like Medicare
prescriptions, highway construction, farm payments, AMTRAK, National
Public Radio and loans to graduate students. Do these sound like the
things you'd like to cut back on to pay for Iraq?

I'll tell you where we ought to start saving: on our bloated military
establishment.

We're paying for weapons we'll never use.

No other Country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last
year Japan spent $42 billion. Italy spent $28 billion, Russia spent only
$19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion.

We have 8,000 tanks for example. One Abrams tank costs 150 times as much
as a Ford station wagon.

We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons - enough to destroy all of
mankind.

We're spending $200 million a year on bullets alone. That's a lot of
target practice. We have 1,155,000 enlisted men and women and 225,000
officers. One officer to tell every five enlisted soldier what to do. We
have 40,000 colonels alone and 870 generals.

We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President
and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this: "We must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. ."

Well, Ike was right. That's just what's happened.

By Andy Rooney