But I’m beginning to think the higher purpose of NATO was to keep Europeans from killing one another, a condition they apparently had to be bribed to accept.

From Subsidized Europe Cries in Despair by Matt Taibbi who is fed up with European perfidy.  The subheading is Europe wonders: how will we maintain our lifestyles, if we can't rip off the American taxpayer anymore?

Can't agree with him on everything but it is a thoroughly muscularly entertaining argument. 

I grew up in American liberal politics, where it was axiomatic that we had much to learn from Europeans. So wise, so sensible! Such terrific priorities! They offered free college, paid vacation, fabulous child care, mellow cops and a broad social safety net, while we heathens in America worked millions of hours and left even people like me to pay cash to set broken bones. I vividly remember seeing Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next?, which cast Americans as dipshit Ricky Bobby types who swallowed their raw deal whole while artless Europeans seemed bewildered by the word “debt,” and expressed shock that Americans didn’t also demand the state-comped honeymoons or gourmet school lunches any civilized person would insist on.

Now it’s turning out that we essentially paid for those programs. Moreover, the bourgeois eggheads here who tsk-tsked their home country’s dumb priorities twenty or thirty years ago are the same people now demanding we not abandon or “diminish the value of military contributions” of European partners. We must remain faithful to “the most powerful and successful alliance in the history of mankind,” as the Atlantic described NATO. Apparently as citizens we were supposed to envy French lunches, Finnish prisons, and Italian vacations, but as voters we must never take steps toward allowing Americans themselves to afford them.

Further on.

Raised to think Europeans were our gentler, more civilized partners, they now look like shameless freeloaders who let their bills for daycare and paid vacations be subsidized by middle-American taxpayers, descendants of those poor Okies and hayseeds who died in piles to save Europe from itself generations ago. Kids of my generation were fed a succession of movies from Red Dawn to Russia House to Rocky IV to make sure we stayed focused on the Soviet enemy, but I’m beginning to think the higher purpose of NATO was to keep Europeans from killing one another, a condition they apparently had to be bribed to accept.

How many more realizations of this type are in the pipeline? What other entitled groups will have to be removed from the teat? It’s getting exhausting, isn’t it?

He's right, though.  It is getting exhausting discovering just how wide and deep has been the rot in Washington where money we don't have spent in ways we don't want, almost always to little policy effect and almost always substantially to the benefit of preening Beltway bandits who admire themselves for the lifestyles they can afford based on the American taxpayer.