Believe me, there are folks here who wish that our leaders here in the US would return to the Monroe Doctrine and leave all of the little countries to do their thing.

Indeed. For the last few years, opinion polls have found that about 40% to 45% of the US population favors a foreign policy of “staying home and minding our own business.” In private conversations, one often hears statements like this by science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle (via Instapundit):

I continue to thank God that Georgia is not yet yet a part of NATO. NATO is an entangling alliance of the sort that George Washington warned us against, and guarantees our involvement in the territorial disputes of Europe. We have no national interest in the independence of Georgia or any portion of it, and we should have no permanent alliances in Europe to begin with. We have as many good reasons to become friends with the new Russian Republic ( Empire if you like) as we do with most of the continental nations; and none of them need an American alliance. If the balance of power in Europe is out of balance, it is due to the new European nation being built there; and that certainly doesn’t need US blood and treasure to defend it.

But such comments are usually followed by a remark of resignation that such will never happen.

I remember him best from his guest appearance in an episode of The Rockford Files in which his character displayed his physical prowess by tearing the top off a beer can. Rockford (James Garner) then did the same thing, saying something like “Aluminum makes a hero out of everybody.”

The RFP is already under fire as pro-NG:

National Review Online
August 08, 2008, 7:00 a.m.

Testing Gates
Tanker re-bid.

By Merrill Cook

A recent report by the independent Government Accountability Office (GAO) devastatingly critiques one of the Pentagon’s critical procurement processes. The July 2008 report demonstrates that the government botched contracts for an urgently needed new generation of aerial refueling tankers not just once, but twice.

With years of delay and billions in budget overruns in many of the Department of Defense’s top programs, many observers are asking just how deep the Pentagon’s procurement problems run. They want to know what the Pentagon’s new chief, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, will do about it.

The problems have been building for years. DOD has allowed squabbles between defense contractors to maroon several key acquisition priorities into a bureaucratic no-man’s land. This at a time the armed forces are in great need of quick turnarounds on life-saving systems like the armored MRAP vehicles for troops patrolling dangerous streets in Iraq.

Unfortunately, few in Washington seem to have learned the lessons of past procurement mistakes. Exhibit A: The Pentagon is trying for the third time to complete a fair competition for a $35 billion contract to replace our fleet of tanker-refueling aircraft. These are the oldest aircraft still flying, and some date back to the Eisenhower administration. Few question that they pose a serious safety threat to pilots. Woeful mismanagement of a sole-source contract hamstrung the first control, while the Government Accountability Office (GAO) rejected the second as an obsequious effort to award Northrop Grumman and EADS — a subsidized European contractor under criminal investigation — a lucrative defense contract for a more expensive and less capable tanker aircraft.

Now under the gun from Congress to produce quick results, Gates has promised that he and his deputy, Undersecretary John Young, will personally oversee the new tanker competition. But instead of simply re-evaluating the previous competition’s bids according to the rules, the Defense Department seems to be engaging smoke-and-mirrors tactics. Undersecretary Young hinted that the Pentagon may now ignore the specifications originally laid out in the contract — specifications that flowed from studies by RAND and Defense Department experts — and jerry-rig new specifications in the contract so that the Pentagon can once again throw the deal to the more expensive, less experienced, foreign contractor. The new version of the contract would give extra credit for a larger tanker aircraft, an action that the GAO report specifically highlighted as a critical flaw of the earlier tanker competition. This is a mistake. For starters, the expert analyses, which defense planners traditionally rely on, all show decisive disadvantages for larger tanker aircraft. They are less efficient, can land at fewer bases, and therefore can service fewer in-flight fighters and cargo planes simultaneously. In fact, the main advantage of larger craft — that they carry more fuel — is rarely an advantage in real-world missions, since the smaller tanker aircraft rarely offload more than 50 percent of the fuel they carry.

Boeing’s KC-767 fits the requirements of a medium-sized tanker much better than the foreign competition’s offerings do. According to several independent reports, Boeing KC-767s could save taxpayers as much as $50 billion, can deliver more fuel to more of our fighter and carrier aircraft, can land on more runways, and are less vulnerable to attack. An award to Boeing would support 44,000 jobs.

Most experts believe that the only way defense bureaucrats can commandeer this deal for EADS and Northrop is to give their KC-30’s larger size a decisive advantage in a slap-dash list of new contract specification. The GAO found nothing at all wrong with the basic integrity of the original contract specifications. Rather, the GAO gave these Pentagon officials reprobate status because they failed to abide by the specifications when they bent over backwards to effectively sole-source the contract to EADS and Northrop.

If Gates and the Defense Department now decide to ignore the clear reasoning of the GAO decision and, instead, concoct a new rationale to sole-source this contract to the foreign vendor by quixotically favoring a larger aircraft, the Bush administration should prepare for a bipartisan revolt.

— Merrill Cook is a former Republican congressman from Utah.

and

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2008/08/07/ldt.sylvester.tanker.bid.cnn

Indeed.

Ironically, Heinkel once projected a bizjet that would have combined a new fuselage with the wings and tail surfaces of the Fouga Magister, which Heinkel had built in the late fifties and early sixties. As far as I know, the bizjet was never built.

Now it’s a battle of the advertisements, Northrop Grumman spots on Washington area radio stations vs. Boeing print ads in publications like Politico, a newspaper for political insiders and junkies. They’re obviously aimed at members of Congress, the next battleground after GAO.

I saw a couple of re-runs of Laugh-In many years ago on cable on Nick-At-Nite and it hadn’t aged well at all. The sight of Peter Lawford, prematurely aged from booze and drugs, dancing and dressed in hip late sixties style, was pathetic.

And for a you-can’t-make-up-this-kind-of-stuff story, consider the life of the “Sock It To Me Girl,” Judy Carne:

http://www.judycarne.com/biography.html

There’s also the Danger Man (a/k/a Secret Agent) episode “Not So Jolly Roger.”