Salon War Room: Did lobbyists influence McCain's "straight talk" on Boeing?. The underlying question is: do senators ever do anything without the interest of some lobbyist? Not a big surprise -- not even news -- that McCain had/has connections to EADS lobbyists. Still, his efforts at derailing Boeing's original tanker lease deal qualify as being in the public interest, and his $6B estimate of how much he saved taxpayers is credible. A couple of people wound up in jail over this scam, and you can't just chalk that down to political influence. The first thing to understand about the tanker deal was that it was concocted wholly inside Boeing: it wasn't something the Air Force cared much about one way or another -- the AF would much rather go for something cutting edge, and there's no real sex appeal in tankers. The reasons are easy enough to grasp: Boeing's 767 was obsolete, due to be replaced by the 787 ("Dreamliner"), but converting it to a tanker would stretch out a little more ROI on the tooling and assembly line; the lease deal was a way of fudging the lack of any budget for tankers, and by the time you added it all up more than doubled Boeing's return (that alone is good for McCain's $6B); and the obsolescence of the old KC-135 fleet should have been an easy sell (they're based on Boeing's original 707). So Boeing's first task was to get the AF to buy into the scam, which was the source of the first round of convictions. Once the AF was on record as wanting $35B of tankers, EADS figured they had their own line of airliners that would work just as well, and somehow they managed to get the bid specs tweaked in their favor -- whether that means we'll be seeing more parties in court remains to be seen. Once the contract was awarded to Northrup Grumman (fronting for EADS), Boeing's political division -- Wichita congressman Todd Tiahrt is so obsessed with the issue Bush nicknamed him Tanker Todd -- went apeshit, putting a full court press on everyone from McCain to the GAO, which signed off on Boeing's talking points last week. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that the only thing that matters is political clout, so we're constantly bombarded with arguments about how many jobs the program will create and where will those jobs go? (The EADS jobs obviously go to France and the UK, but a big chunk of the mod work goes to Alabama. The Boeing jobs are promised to Kansas and Washington, but less obviously also include Japan and China.) Boeing (headquarters Chicago) can even get someone like Obama to opine that those government-paid jobs should be American jobs, without giving any thought to how inefficient a jobs program this is, let alone the more basicquestion of what we need tankers for. The core mission of the USAF tanker fleet is to make it possible to rapidly deploy US forces, especially tactical bombers, anywhere in the world. After eight years of Bush Doctrine, you'd think we'd start to have second thoughts about being the world's block bully. But rather than ask such philosophical questions, the next best thing may be to follow the money and unravel the corruption. If we're lucky they'll all wind up in jail, and we'll never get around to rebuilding a fleet we don't need and shouldn't want.

I went ahead and posted the above paragraph as a comment at Salon, where it will be quickly forgotten. None of the other comments came anywhere close to my points. I am surprised that the story gets next to no attention outside of Wichita. The jobs actually won't make much of a difference even here. Net, even if Boeing wins the contract, we may wind up losing jobs -- the old KC-135 fleet depends on Wichita stay in the air, but the new tankers could just as well be moved to some other tax haven. But it's such an extraordinary example of how corruptly politicized defense spending has become in the US. At the same time, Boeing has transformed itself from America's top export company to a den of scam artists who do nothing but exploit their political graft, willing to do anything for government bucks, no matter how badly -- check out their Mexican border fence, or their latest anti-missile technology. There are many ways you can look at what's wrong with America, and a lot of them show up here.