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I am a formal congressional staffer in both the House and the Senate and virtually no one reads any given bill or even cares much about what is in it other than memorizing the talking points about it. Bills are almost completely written by lobbyists and a bunch of 23 year old staffers are not knowledgeable enough to have any valid comprehension or input.

The job of a congressional staffer is to ensure reelection so we spend almost our time getting the member on the most powerful committees (for more campaign contributions) and getting on tv (for free media).

Committees do spend more time on the content of bills but each member usually only has one staffer for multiple committees and they are still told how to vote by the party.

The largest polluter in the world is the U.S. Government. Tracking ships and whatever is all fine but there is a reason why the U.S. Gov ops itself out of every piece of climate legislation. The insane pollution I saw in the military would send a whole lot of people to jail if a company did them.

True but the F-18s simply couldn't do many of the jobs at all. I obviously have a bias but I think it is very plausible that politics had a lot more to do with it than maintenance.

Both but I think the superhornets will still under warranty so they even had not military techs who would fix them.

F-18s def are lower maintenance overall but they couldn’t go very far (important when your ship isn’t docked in Bagdad) or drop bombs in adverse weather so not very useful during a war. Doesn’t mean they are not politically useful, though. One part is made in each congressional district on purpose.

It's fun to have been a part of history in that way though. And when I have some kind of career advancement I always throw up a "mission accomplished" banner as a joke.

Excellent question. I worked in politics after the military and when I was in the West Wing during the Bush admin it came up once! They said the same thing, that it was the ship's idea. I reminded them that aircraft carriers don't have printing presses so it would be a little hard for the sailors to put that kind of banner together.

It could be that the ship's leadership wanted something like that (they are politicians too). But at least in my squadron we were all furious the president was coming because we had been out at sea for the longest nuclear and F-14 cruise of all time (10 months) and we just wanted to go home to our families but now we are delayed another week for a political stunt and have to spend the next two weeks cleaning the ship in preparation.

I think we thought they were a lot more sophisticated than they actually were. But shock and awe was designed to basically neutralize all of that anyway. The Navy was the night shift and that included a lot of tomahawk missiles too. The Air Force was the daytime campaign so there was a lot of capability to take out different threats.

The biggest threat I remember was we were very sure Saddam had chemical weapons (mostly because we sold them to him previously, but I digress). So we had to carry gas masks and did chemical attack drills alot. We also were forced to take many shots including small pox and an experimental anthrax shot. Many of my friends have medical conditions they believe are related to those shots.

I served in the last F-14 squadron, VF-31. When President Bush landed on our carrier (Mission Accomplished!) they had the inferior F-18s in the background for the political shots. We were told that was because the US taxpayers would be pissed if they knew how ripped off they got for the F-18, which was replacing the F-14 in all of the squadrons.

This might be just F-14 bravado, of course, but I do also remember that like the second week of "shock and awe" (the initial Iraq campaign bombing) they stopped all F-14 flights for the same reasons. F-14s were trouncing the sorties of the F-18s, even though we were one squadron vs four or five of their squadrons, because we were the only jets capable of actually reaching Bagdad from the carrier and we were able to convert our bombs to "smart bombs" much faster (F-14s break a lot more so our techs were more skilled).

Why would I get my climate opinions from an economist? I prefer getting my opinions from politicians.

I use to work in Congress. 100% of it is written by lobbyists.