Why Worry? Learn to Love the Bomber : Democrats back billions for the B-2, a Cold War relic that even the Pentagon doesn’t want.

Isn’t it just wild that so many liberal House Democrats overcame their aversion to unnecessary weapons systems and voted to keep the B-2 bomber program alive? What stamina. These are truly shop-till-you-drop people. Unable to get funding for any worthwhile expenditures, they blew our money on this ridiculous little item just so they wouldn’t leave the store empty-handed.

Actually, it’s not such a little item--$553 million this year--but it gets us committed to spending billions more for planes that the Pentagon says are not needed, the President did not ask for and the Senate did not fund. A plane that conservative Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has correctly called “a relic of the Cold War . . . that could cost the American people $36 billion.”

The B-2, like its predecessor the B-1, was designed for a specific Cold War strategic purpose--fighting a nuclear war. The scenario went like this: After we and the Soviets fired nuclear armed missiles at each other with total abandon, the stealth bombers deployed just prior to the fireworks would finally arrive on the scene, penetrate what remained of Soviet air defenses and destroy any remaining targets. Of course, there wouldn’t be any surviving targets, thanks to nuclear overkill, but the stealth nuclear bombs would make the radioactive rubble bounce and then the pilots could exhaust their fuel supply and crash with no airfields to return to.

This weapon from hell made little sense then and none at all now in the aftermath of the Cold War. That’s why an exhaustive Pentagon study released in May said that we don’t need any more of these bombers past the 20 now in production; better to spend the money on smart munitions of the kind used successfully in the Gulf War and on upgrading existing planes.

As McCain said, “The simple fact is that we don’t need more strategic bombers to meet the likely threats of the future.” So why did leading House liberals, including Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) and the majority of the black caucus, provide the margin of defeat for an amendment to stop expansion of the B-2 program? That amendment, co-sponsored by consistent liberal Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland) and conservative budgetmeister John R. Kasich (R-Ohio), was supported by 80 Republicans but lost by 16 votes, thanks to the new gang of B-2 liberals.

The answer is that the Democrats are, as Kasich noted, in “a pitiful state.” Blinded by a string of defeats, they now see light at the end of the Republican budget-cutting spree, where every social program is to be gutted but military spending increased. The military-industrial complex is the last vestige of the welfare state.

In this cynical climate, the liberals got behind the B-2 as the closest thing to a jobs program that we’re likely to see. You expect opportunistic Democrats like Jane Harman, who is a leader of the “stealth caucus” and whose Rolling Hills district has heavy defense representation, to do this sort of thing. But whatever possessed as principled a liberal as Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) to team up with B-1 bomber Bob Dornan (R-Garden Grove) in this infamy? Sheer desperation. “It’s a departure for me,” Waters admitted, “But my district has many aerospace jobs which are being lost. I didn’t want to add to the pain. If we had saved the money , it would not have gone to job creation or jobs programs; it would go to reduce the deficit, which doesn’t interest me at all.”

I suspect it interests quite a few taxpayers who have to service the debt. True, there are 30,000 jobs connected with B-2 production. I agree that those workers should be protected. Pay them--just don’t build the plane. That’s the far cheaper solution. It is one thing to favor extended unemployment insurance and job training for defense workers whose jobs are redundant in the aftermath of the Cold War. It is cowardly to continue the fiction that the plane which they work on is needed.

The B-2 is a woefully inefficient jobs program. Most of the money goes to wasted material resources and profit, not wages. There are plenty of government projects that would both create jobs and produce something needed, like schools or child-care centers. Waters knows this as well as anyone because she has successfully sponsored a number of such projects in her day. The B-2 is not at all like that--it is waste, pure and simple, and to champion it reduces liberalism to a caricature. Let someone else play that tired political game, but the few honest liberals we have left, like Waters, should stick to their principles.