HIGHTOWER: The M.O.B.: Pentagon Boondoggle
Oh joy! The Pentagon has come up with a brand new way to spend $2 Billion more of our tax funds.Yes, the people who brought you the $1,600 hammer and the multibillion-dollar scam of Star Wars, now want you and me to pay for a new Pentagon pipe dream to be called -- drum roll please: MOBMOB is short for Mobile Offshore Base. The idea is to build giant, floating military bases much like offshore, oil-drilling platforms -- only much, much bigger. Each one is to be big enough for huge, C-130 cargo planes to land on it. Big enough for thousands of troops to be stationed aboard it. Big enough for an armory of weapons, tanks, landing craft and other invasion equipment to be stored on it. And these things float, you see, way out in the Pacific, the Persian Gulf, the Adriatic Sea or wherever -- sort of like man made, ever ready continents of war, at only two billion bucks a pop (not counting cost overruns, of course).With these big babies in place, our Washington leaders can get us into even more foreign entanglements than we're now in, and they won't have to be dependent on Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other nations as a staging-area for their military adventures.The whole scheme is dumber than Dumb-de-dumb-dumb, but believe it on not, Defense Secretary William Perry has already given the green-light to develop the MOB, and Pentagon contractors are going ga-ga over the possibility of cashing-in on such a buoyant-boondoggle. The Wall Street Journal reports that Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Inc., has the inside track on getting the first contract to build a MOB. Guess who heads Halliburton? Dick Cheney, the former secretary of defense who helped to bring us Star Wars!I think we need a lynch mob to stop the MOB -- to stop Dick Cheney, William Perry and this whole gang of Pentagon thieves from picking our pockets again.
