That's spectacular ignorance worthy of Glen Beck.
Can we stop trashing Beck all the time for supposed ignorance? I highly doubt you watch his show, the bullshit about him being wrong all the time, constantly lying, it's more shit from people that don't watch his show either. Hop on politifact and read the information given on his supposed lies and ignorance, they always give detailed explanations and the burn job the wingnuts are doing on the guy is entirely undeserved. He's more accurate than the typical hard news caster is. I catch dozens of errors every day just because they report shit before they have the story right.
Both our declared wars in the 20th century were the product of Democratic majorities in Congress and administered by Democratic presidents. In 1941, they were freakin' New Deal Democrats. Gah! Even our last big debacle of a misguided war was almost entirely the responsibility of Democratic leaders, although LBJ & friends managed to avoid busting the treasury, unlike Bush 43 & friends.
It's quite true that the nanny state progressives have long been the engine of interventionism. However, wartime spending, if it can be called that, has dick to do with our financial status. See page 29.
As you can see, spending under Bush 43 never exceeded levels during the 80's, despite a rapidly expanding entitlement cost. This includes the budgets passed by the democratic congress that took over in 06. It's fuckward that's busting the treasury with a 10% of GDP deficit spending level, what we had under Bush was just the same irresponsible norm we've been running since the nanny staters took over congress. We've had a grand total of one responsible speakers in the last half-century, and all he got for his troubles was the boot. Tossed from his position in disgrace over improprieties they all engage in regularly as a matter of course, all for having the audacity to make them pass a balanced budget like they said they would. An accomplishment that held a whole three years before they took the budget levels back above sustainable spending levels.
You're woefully ignorant if you assume that what passes for 'the left' in the U.S. is dominated by pacifists. First, we have no real left, just molly-coddlers who have yet to recover from the Regan era. Second, Jimmy Carter is the closest thing we've had to an 'anti-war' president (Obama's rhetoric is anti-war, but his policy is obviously closer to some neo-real-politik mutant thing). Clinton threw our military weight around just as freely as Reagan or Bush 41, he just tried for different spin because he wanted to keep the real anti-war folks deluded enough to keep supporting him.
Actually, Bush 43 is the closest thing we've had to an anti-war president. You forget that he was an isolationist. Take 9/11 out of the history books and he'd never have set things in motion, it was a wake-up call, if perhaps not entirely to reality as he seems to have overshot the mark. Carter on the other hand was just plain stupid. We were simply saved from his bungling because he lost the election over one them. The rest of his indiscretions in an attempt to shape the world to his farcical views without making open actions managed to slip under the radar because he didn't get US personnel killed in a visible fashion as he did trying that absurd rescue attempt. War by proxy is still war. Reagan continued the policies, oddly enough, but it was Carter that began arming the Mujaheddin. He frequently chose less than reputable sides in third world conflicts.
Collectivists will always fall prey to a need to intervene in other individuals problems, individualists are rarely moved so greatly as to force others to act for another in a situation of their own making. You say we haven't had a left wing since Reagan, but he was really just a moderate. The fiscal conservative with a constructionist mindset disappeared from government in this country nearly a century back. Both parties have been a progressive play pen in the interim. What we really have is no right wing, just a horrid mixture of social conservatives that think with something other than their brains screwing up law enforcement and creating drug lords in foreign countries, and fiscal liberals that want their hands in the cookie jar appealing to that need for moral control over others.
