Hightower Lowdown

The major output of the 106th Congress has been hot air and hypocrisy, and on September 21, we got a blast of both when GOP Senators Larry Craig, Jeff Sessions, and Craig Thomas assembled the media to launch a verbal tirade at President Clinton. Clinton deserved to be blasted—the issue was his jolly trade jaunts to China, Chile, and Africa last year, which cost us taxpayers $72 million, mostly from the Pentagon budget. The senators piously complained that these millions could have gone to veterans or to improve the pay of our troops.

True enough, but let us count the levels of hypocrisy spewing from these three unwise men. First, senators go junketing around the world all the time, and guess where their travel funds come from? Bingo if you said the Pentagon budget! Second, Congress is responsible for having cut funds to veterans and having failed to provide adequate pay for the troops—pay so low that some soldiers are on food stamps.

Third, even while these hot air geysers were spouting about the wasteful misuse of the Pentagon budget, their colleague, Majority Leader Trent Lott, was working behind the scenes to waste $1.5 billion of Pentagon money. Sen. Lott's little project is to buy a new aircraft carrier—a ship the Navy doesn't want, saying it can better spend the money elsewhere. Why is Lott so insistent? Perhaps because the ship would be built in his own state of Mississippi.