Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) is one of the biggest defenders of the V-22, which the Pentagon decided to buy last week.
Makes sense; he's got a Boeing plant in his district that stands to gain lots of work and jobs building V-22s.
After the Pentagon announced its decision, Weldon had this to say about the program's many detractors:
This is total vindication from all of the critics who had taken cheap shots at the V-22 project over the years.
Cheap shots like this?
If the V-22 was unaffordable in 1989, it is even more unaffordable now.
That was Dick Cheney, in 1992 -- three years after he killed the V-22 as defense secretary. Congress kept it alive.
Weldon, of course, knows a little about cheap shots. In 1999, he said repeatedly -- on the House floor and elsewhere -- that the Clinton administration "leaked the design for our W87 warhead to U.S. News & World Report. Not just the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Iraqis and Iranians, anyone who would buy U.S. News & World Report on July 31, 1995 got a documented diagram of the W87, which up until that point in time was classified."
He even got specific: "Hazel O'Leary leaked the plans . . . for the W87 nuclear warhead."
Hazel O'Leary was the Energy Secretary at the time. And she did nothing of the sort, as the Federation of American Scientists' Steve Aftergood has documented. (Also see here.)
-- posted by Dan Dupont
