So, where is the ACLU and their gang? You know, the ones who created the "Separation of Church & State" slogan to be used in lieu of the actual wording of 1st Amendment.
It would seem to me that, while we are really in a Depression rather than a perpetual season of "green shoots", and looking down both barrels of the greatest debt this country has ever known, we could put the taxpayer's money to better use than having the U.S. State Department renovate or build mosques in some 27 countries around the world at a cost in the hundreds of billions.
This is what I mean by some "religions" being more equal than others.
And, to be fair, this travesty began while Bush was still in office.
3 comments:
So we borrow money from China to fix up mosques in Albania? Makes perfect sense!
We need to not only shitcan these projects but ALL federal foreign aid. If Americans want to send their own money overseas to build mosques or buy goats or whatever, they're welcome to do so. We don't need the crooked SOB's in DC doing it for us with whatever ulterior motives they have.
Bawb, there you go again...
The Ambassador's Fund is used to preserve historically significant buildings, manuscripts, etc., NOT to build new mosques. Essentially, through these small grants, the U.S. allows poor and conflict-ridden countries to preserve elements of their heritage that might otherwise crumble or be destroyed. It is essentially good public relations for the U.S. and is also preserving ancient monuments and cultural artifacts for the rest of the world.
The Fund is not used only for restoring mosques. While I am averse to doing more than 5 minutes of research on a blog comment, I did look through a few pages of funded projects. I found some mosques and Islamic manuscripts (and encouraging serious scholarship of Islamic religious manuscripts can help defeat some of the radical ideas only recently invented and propagated by extremists), but I also found restoration projects on a Christian temple, Christian mission churches, a Buddhist temple, and a Taoist temple. Most of the projects dealt with non-religious cultural items.
Foreign aid accounts for less than 1% of the federal budget, including military aid. Helping other countries build stable, democratic societies can help them become strategic diplomatic partners, military allies, and trading partners.
Some of the U.S.'s staunchest allies are in Eastern Europe, and their positive opinions are based in part on U.S. assistance as they attempted to transition from communism. Soft diplomacy doesn't always work, but almost any of these programs are a tremendous bargain when stacked up against a single Stinger missile, or the loss of a single U.S. soldier.
Oh, foreign aid is only 1% of the budget. Whew! I guess when you're going $2 trillion in the hole every year, what's 1%?
If you're one of the unborn children who will eventually work their whole lives trying to repay the debt we're racking up right now, you might call it "taxation without representation."
If you're a current taxpayer you might just call it "bullshit!" If the feds spent one red cent on this crap before 9-11, trying to buy friends in the Moslem world, then I want a friggin' refund!
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