From "The Hill" --Think tank to Obama: Defense budget not your domestic ATM

H/T Instapundit.

From an article at The Hill ...
The Heritage Foundation marks the moment when President Obama lets the mask slip and reveals his real priorities:

“The nice thing about the defense budget is it’s so big, it’s so huge, that a 1 percent reduction is the equivalent of the education budget,” Obama said, immediately noting he was “exaggerating” the exact numbers.

 Only by an order of magnitude Mr. President. Only by an order of magnitude (~13X).

Mr. President, the 'nice thing' about the defense budget is that it is one of the few things in the Federal Budget that actually belongs there....unlike all that other crap you want to spend it on.

The Heritage Blog Post that was the source of The Hill's article also mentions some specific problems with how "Defense" is (not) managed by the current Administration:

What the President left out is the impact his “modest changes” are having on our men and women in the Armed Forces. The poster child for stupid defense budgeting is the F–35: how the Administration has stretched out, exaggerated the costs of, and played politics with funding for the military’s next-generation fighter aircraft. Today’s air forces are the oldest in the history of U.S. air forces. Replacing old airframes and ensuring the U.S. maintains its superiority over potential adversaries is a national security priority.
Yet Obama has done little to show he takes the challenge of modernizing the air fleets seriously. Particularly troubling is his penchant to let the Pentagon slow-roll the fielding of the F–35B (the vertical takeoff and landing version of the fighter for the Marine Corps). The answer may be, as one defense analyst notes, “Put the Obama Administration on Probation, Not The F–35B.”
Today, the Marines are stuck with aging airframes that have limited capabilities and are expensive to operate—a double problem. In contrast, the “B is a winner on both counts. The impact on the fleet is significant. The Marines go from three to one aircraft; and it gets a new aircraft with significant reductions in cost of maintenance.”
The fate of the F–35 is a case study in the President’s penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to defense spending. 

President Obama's early successes depended on enough people believing "He surely doesn't mean that!" when every stupid idea was brought forth. His problem now is that more people take his Regime's machinations at face value.
P.S. I had NO idea there was an F-35 story at the end of this string when I started pulling it.