Hugh Hewitt’s Chinese Crock of Shit

Hewitt is an American radio talk show host with the Salem Radio Network, a Christian-focused satellite radio network in Dallas. A conservative, he writes about law, society, politics, and media bias in the United States. Hewitt is president and CEO of the Richard Nixon Foundation, a law professor at Chapman University School of Law, a columnist for The Washington Post, and a regular political commentator on NBC News and MSNBC.

He’s also war-mongering in his recent and hysterical Washington Post editorial titled Americans must rally against the real threat to our democracy: China.

Sorry to disagree, Hugh, but America’s main threat to democracy at the moment is the Republican party you shill for. China is way, waaay down the list, a communist dictatorship that, so far as I can tell, does not have military advisors in 270 countries, has not attacked any Asian or Middle Eastern nations in the past four decades, has a population three-times ours, a military budget 1/3rd the size of ours and remains America’s largest trading and manufacturing partner.

It’s a hoot that Hewitt is president and CEO of the Richard Nixon Foundation.

Nixon and Henry Kissinger were the duo that opened China to cooperation with the U.S. in 1973 and they were a far more dangerous communist threat then than now. No administration has had either the foresight or courage to open Russia to the West, preferring to keep that country in the dangerous darkness of poverty. Does Hewitt think Nixon made a poor choice? Does he blame his foundation’s namesake for initiating a relationship that promoted ‘the real threat to our democracy?’ And, by the way, Hugh, America is not a democracy, it’s a republic. Always good to be accurate.

Men like Hewitt keep the myth alive that communism is a threat to democracy and must be countered at all costs. Myth number one is that communism will spread like wildfire unless it is defeated philosophically, economically and, if necessary, militarily.

Let’s take a look at the scoreboard in that regard, cost-wise. We have never defeated a communist regime by force of arms. The Korean war ended in stalemate and division to communist North and democratic South. We got our military ass handed to us in Vietnam, which is now the Socialist Republic of Việt Nam. Philosophically, most communist countries of the world are slowly becoming socialist nations with a capitalist tendency. Economically, one need only look at Vietnam and China to see both nations are doing just fine, building a middle class and improving the lives of their citizens.

40,000 American lives were lost in the Korean War and 58,000 in Vietnam, two wars that brought us no advantage at all. The Vietnam War cost $168 billion or $1 trillion in today's dollars. That included $111 billion in military operations and $28.5 billion in aid to South Vietnam. Compensation benefits for Vietnam veterans and families still cost $22 billion a year and will until all survivors are dead and buried. Costs of our annual 70-year military presence in South Korea are hard to pin down, but we maintain about 19,500 soldiers, 7,800 airmen and women, 350 sailors and 120 Marines stationed there just to keep Kim Jong Un at bay and that’s not cheap.

Iraq and the 20 years we spent floundering in Afghanistan cost us $10 trillion and quite likely twice that if the Pentagon was ever able to balance a budget. They have been unable to do that since their inception, no doubt too chagrinned by $500 toilet seats and trillion dollar F-35 embarrassment.

What a deal.

Doofuses like Hewitt are why 42% of the U.S. annual budget goes to the military, while our country pauperizes itself in policy-driven wars it never wins.

It’s tiresome—but necessary—to keep track of war-mongering individuals in the news who have never worn America’s uniform and never served in combat, yet never contemplated a war they didn’t love. There’s something thrilling about sending other people’s children to die. The Dick Cheneys of that stripe are the most notorious and dangerous, but the Hugh Hewitts keep the pulse of war alive in the body politic and, in many ways, that’s a greater disservice.

I’ve quoted General and President Dwight Eisenhower before on this subject, but it’s worth repeating: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” That, from a man who led the European forces through WWII and hated every moment of the losses in men and material.

Hewitt brazenly encourages us in that direction again and it discredits The Washington Post to carry his opinion. Democracy Dies in Darkness is their motto and yet they promote Hugh Hewitt as one of their Opinions essayists.

Darkness is not the only thing in which democracy dies. War-mongering comes in a close second.