Republicans Fail to Start

**This blog entry was written previousely and is being reposted here.  I will post all of my previous articles here in the coming weeks. RRB**

The START treaty has been ratified.  If it is true that it links nuclear arms reduction with missile defense; the Senate and the administration have made a serious mistake.  Missile Defense should never be confused with a nuclear offensive capability.

Have any of these geniuses thought about the long term consequences of what this will mean, as a result of ratification?  Think about this for just one minute.  Venezuela just finished a $5 billion arms deal with Russia and in October 2010, it was reported that Russia had also signed a deal to develop nuclear power plants in Venezuela.  Anyone would have to be naïve to, not at least, acknowledge the possibility that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is not going to immediately start a nuclear weapons program.  Or possibly purchase nuclear weapons outright.  This would be a serious threat to the United States and to all countries in the Western Hemisphere.

Worse now that this treaty has been ratified, it will allow Russia to proliferate nuclear technology to countries which could eventually threaten the United States while at the same time restricting the United States of the ability to develop and deploy a missile defense system to, not only protect the United States but also provide security for our allies both in Europe and Central/South America.
Will this happen tomorrow? No of course not.  But that doesn’t mean that the United States should have been so shortsighted as to believe that it couldn’t eventually happen.  And the United States should not give up its technical advantage in the area of missile defense.

Additionally, as Charles Krauthammer points out, it also restricts the number of delivery systems, and since US delivery systems can also be used to launch conventional weapons, this again puts the US at a disadvantage. 

Are all those in Congress so blind as to not see that there are serious long term consequences of ratification? Obviously they are, because they ratified the treaty despite these concerns.   Republicans in the Senate are particularly disappointing on this issue.  All that was needed here is some common sense and apparently that is what is lacking in Washington.   The START Treaty is a bad deal.  What is worse is that it was taken up for debate during a Lame Duck session, what a travesty.   This Treaty, whether you are for it or against it, should not have been debated in a lame duck session of Congress.  There are six incoming Republican Senators who defeated Democrat incumbents and another six Senators who are replacing other Republicans.  In total there are twelve new Senators, who will be sworn-in in January, 2011 (ten of them requested that this treaty be taken up after they were seated).  It is probably safe to say that if they were allowed to vote it would have been much less likely that the treaty would have been ratified.  They were never given the chance; even though voters in six states repudiated their representatives and their policy decisions.

But alas it’s too late…  And the Republicans in the Senate continue to behave as if the elections of November 2010 never happened.  They continue to capitulate to the whims of Harry Reid and the Democrats.  Republicans have FAILED in their duty to the American people and to the electorate.  They FAILED to understand that their play, politically, was to extend the current tax rates and pass a continuing resolution for the budget. NOTHING MORE!  The Democrats have rolled over them and we still have 12 days before the new Congress is sworn in.

This has gone from disappointing to DISGUSTING!