It's the mark of a true soldier.

Reading Ryan and Titus' posts concerning the turn the Republican Party has taken made me think a little.

Reagan takes office January 1981. Leonid Breshnev was Premier of the Soviet Union and the face of the Warsaw Pact. (What, he's LESS photogenic than Erik Honnaker? Go figure.) He needs to beat the Warsaw Pact in the one way he KNOWS he can without sterilizing the face of the planet with nuclear bombs: Economically. So his defense spending is two pronged. #1) A lot of Americans are put to work in the defense industry. #2) Our armed forces haven't seen that kind of financial infusion since 1941. Reagan's slashing of federal government domestic programs created controversy but did nothing to balance the money he DID spend in defense. And in less than a decade his policy wins.

So here we are two decades later wondering what's going to happen next. There is no "outspending" Al Quieda. And in terms of sheer economic might we are facing an equal for the first time in a century: China. What policy, short of sterilizing the surface of the planet with nuclear weapons, gets us out of this mess?

Funny thing, free market. You dabble, you dip your toes, you stay in the shallow end of the pool, and hey! Water's fine. But there's no going back. The more China exposes its population to free markets the harder it is to maintain the type of central control China's been famous for for, well, a little over 2000 years. The same goes for Al Quieda. Hard to encourage fanaticism in a disenfranchised youth when that youth isn't disenfranchised.

What type of economic plan wins us this two front war?

Two words: Energy Independence.

If the next president, or the one after him, decides to invoke conservative change like Reagan did, then the kind of money Reagan put into defense needs to go into domestic energy production. In our quasi-free market, how much of an average family's gross income goes towards energy, for home and vehicle? If that were reduced substantially, not through redistribution of wealth, not through socialist policies, but through government energy programs, what does that do to our economic engine as compared to the Chinese? Or any OPEC nation?

I've sung this song a lot and I know it gets old to you guys, but think about it in the light of a failed "Dem light" election. A federal program of coal to gasoline refineries. A federal works project for solar and wind for private homes. A federal move to revitalize mass transportation on an interstate level. All in the name of a national security policy that states we are safest when we are strong.

And let me tell you, it's getting harder to yank B.O.B. quotes without repeating.