Defense Contractors Gone Wild

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted September 19, 2006.

The billions we're spending on the worthless F-22 fighter plane is just the latest taxpayer rip-off. When will the military-industrial complex get the smackdown it deserves?

There are small news stories, there are really small news stories, and then there is "Defense Institute Head Resigns," a little maggot of a news item that blipped into the "D" section of the Washington Post last Wednesday. 356 words in all, about half the length of an AP NFL game account, and the Post was the only paper in the country that ran the story. So how important could it have been?

Actually, the Post item about the resignation of Dennis C. Blair from the federally-funded Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) spoke volumes about the utter insanity of the modern American media landscape. In a month when Katie Couric redefined the "scoop" as an advance glimpse of celebrity idiot-spawn Suri Cruise, and investigative journalism according to muckraking icon 60 Minutes meant sappy profiles of Howard Stern and Bill Romanowski, it made all the sense in the world that the denouement of a spectacular tale of massive government waste and fraud would go completely unnoticed by virtually the entire journalism community.