Someone needs to tell the Grey Lady there is no Room for Debate

Arg. Deprived of one my main sources for news, I finally buckled and paid the damn subscription fee for the New York Times. In spite of how often I criticize it, The Times is still a reasonably good news source more often than not, particularly offering more depth than other news outlets. And I like Paul Krugman, and their Travel Section, and the fact that they police their own comment boards so that the discussions generated actually enhance, rather than obscure meaning.

And then I see something that makes me cringe because it is virtually no value to the reader and producer of news alike.

One of the web-exclusive features of the Times is a somewhat slapdash "Room for Debate" opinion "thing." I really don't know what to call it--other than garbage. I say this because on the subjects the Times chooses, there is absolutely no room for debate among sane, thinking individuals. Basically, some editor for the paper selects a few people of expertise and they write a few paragraphs on a given subject of "debate."

The most recent exercise in this debacle was military spending. Some nameless editor simply phrased the question as follows:

Annual military spending has risen more than 70 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 2001. With the drive to reduce the deficit, the current $700 billion Pentagon budget is considered by budget cutters to be a good place to find savings.
Which areas of the Pentagon budget should Leon Panetta, the next defense secretary, target for savings? What kinds of spending could most easily be cut back? How big a peace dividend might be expected from withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan?

The debate should have been settled last week when an elite team of Navy Seals--not a military force of 100,000 soldiers--killed Osama bin Laden and made off with a virtual truckload of Al-Qaeda information. And for seven of the eight online "debaters," it was. One could read seven different iterations of the same theme: remove American soldiers from large commitments overseas and stop spending a literal fortune on cold-war era programs. I could read this from the perspective of a retired military colonel, A university professor of international relations, a history professor (you know, to mix it up a little bit), a "Lecturer" at Harvard University, an MIT research scientist, and even the Koch brothers funded Cato Institute research fellow. Oh, and Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense. When people of opposing political perspectives agree with each other, that's not debate. That's agreement. The lone outlier in this discussion was Mackenzie Eaglen of the ultra-right wing Heritage Foundation. Her proposal was Donald Rumsfeld's failed policy with her name on it: more troop presence, more money for weapons programs, coupled with pay cuts for soldiers and outsourcing tasks to civilian personnel. Yeah, like that saved money.

Maybe the New York Times can do a little cost-cutting of its own and eliminate this stupid "debate" forum and just report on the facts. The headline and sub-head might read as follows: "Experts across the political spectrum call for reduction in military spending, Heritage Foundation still mired in its own web of delusion.

Just a thought.