Subject: Small hands need big ships
Toria Sheffield of People magazine reports that at this weekend’s Turning Point USA AmericaFest, Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters told the audience that the ballroom President Donald J. Trump wants to build next to the White House is “four times the size of the White House.” According to Watters, Trump told him: “Jesse, it’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will.”
The last battleship in history to be built was the HMS Vanguard, completed in 1946; the last battleship commissioned by the U.S. was the USS Missouri, which was decommissioned in the 1990s. It has been determined that there is little efficacy to a battleship, now that ballistic and cruise missiles have longer range, a bigger bang and can be launched from smaller, cheaper platforms than a battleship's cannons. Using battle ships in its original role is about the same as using a horse-back cavalry charge in its original role. The only winner in building battleships are the firms (and their stockholders) of the companies that build them (and, of course the politicians in the districts in which they are built who are "bringing back the bacon" of tax-payer funded jobs.
A former rear admiral who is director at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies told Seligman and Weisgerber that the Golden Fleet is “exactly what we don’t need.”
This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will build two new “Trump-class” battleships. As Lara Seligman and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal note, Trump has complained for years that America’s warships are “terrible-looking,” and has been involved in the design of the new “Golden Fleet.” In an illustration of the new battleship provided by the White House, the vessel sports an image of Trump on its upper deck. Useless or not, these ships last a long time and I guess will form part of the president's legacy (while the Qatari Air Force One being converted at taxpayer expense seems like a going away present).
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Jeff