Bill and KT were breathlessly discussing the "breaking news" on Fox that the Russians were developing some kind of super-missile. I figured out that they were talking about the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, a weapon so secret that it has its own page on Wikipedia. Not only that, but this only counts as "breaking news" if this is, say, 2003 - India and Russia have jointly been developing, and now producing, the BrahMos for several years, in fact the missile is currently in service with the Indian military. Bill and KT wondered aloud why, since President Obama "reset" relations with the Russians, were they even developing new weapons in the first place? (Probably for the same reason the US, China, Great Britain, France, Israel, etc. keep developing new weapons systems...)
But KT wasn't done flaunting her ignorance yet. She went on to say that Russia now had a stranglehold on energy supplies to Europe thanks to their new Nord Stream and their second "southern" pipeline. The problem here is that construction on Nord Stream, which will run under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, won't even start until next year. South Stream (the "southern" pipeline) is still on the drawing board and facing stiff competition from the Nabucco Pipeline (also still in the planning stages), which would link Central Asia and Europe, bypassing Russian territory entirely.
She then went on to chide Obama for cutting funding for the anti-ballistic missile shield bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, leaving us vulnerable to the new Russian super-missile (which the ABM system would have been useless against anyway since the BrahMos is a cruise missile that flies just meters above the ground, not a ballistic one that flies in a high, arching trajectory - the target of the ABM system). Finally she said (and Bill agreed) that India's decision to work with Russia on the BrahMos was because Obama had "weakened" America on the world stage - apparently ignorant of the fact that Russia (and before them the Soviet Union) had been a major arms supplier to India for decades, and that among other systems, Russia is in the process of supplying India with an aircraft carrier, and once the Nerpa completes its sea trials, a nuclear attack submarine.
That's an awful lot of misinformation to pack into just three minutes...Frankly, I don't blame Hemmer so much for this ridiculous segment - he's just a typical news channel talking head, someone who looks pleasant and can read a teleprompter, but who has no real knowledge about, well, anything. McFarland though is another matter. Someone who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs should know a little something about two of the world's larger military powers. Next time Fox News wants to put on an "expert" on foreign affairs, they should find someone who knows what they're talking about in the first place.
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