This woman certainly has a flair for the dramatic, in the introduction she congratulates the students for being brave enough attend her speech. Yeah, like going to a lecture at Kane Hall is the moral equivilant of storming Omaha Beach under fire. The biggest risk you face there is getting mugged while waiting for your bus on the Ave.
As a Russian and East European studies major at the University of Washington, having taken many a class at Kane Hall, I was particularly annoyed at this speech being full of bad Soviet comparisons. Half the speech was, "Well Stalin did something bad, which has a superficial resemblence to something Bush might do if we let him". Yeah, Stalin murdered 20 million people, Bush had water dumped on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's head, big difference genius.
This idiotic part pretty much summed it up for me.
When the Berlin Wall fell, the third of the US economy that is defense manufacturing was facing a declining market share because we lost our global enemy. And what do you have to do if you are losing a global enemy and you are the defense industry? Make a new enemy, exactly. They were facing a real economic catastrophe unless they could hype a new enemy. Enter the Global War on Terrorism.
A third of of the economy? In 1989 military spending was only 5.6% of GDP. Given that much of that was salaries for the soldiers themselves, defense manufacturing was only about 2-3% of the economy. Is she just making this crap up?
