Democrats continue to argue in favor of no-bid military contracts. They are slamming McCain for arguing against a no-bid contract for Boeing, on the grounds that some of his aides lobbied for Airbus after the corrupt Boeing tanker deal was shot down.

The misleading lede in today’s New York Times story buckles under the explanation it offers a few paragraphs down:

McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in waiting, has been a key figure in the Pentagon’s yearslong attempt to complete a deal on the tanker. McCain helped block an earlier tanker contract with Boeing and prodded the Pentagon in 2006 to develop bidding procedures that did not exclude Airbus…
“All I asked for in this situation was a fair competition,’’ he told reporters Monday at Lambert Field in St. Louis, home of a Boeing fighter jet plant.
On Friday, he defended his aggressive oversight: ‘’I never weighed in for or against anybody that competed for the contract. All I asked for was a fair process. And the facts are that I never showed any bias in any way against anybody — except for the taxpayer.’’

He made them hold a real competitive bidding process and saved the taxpayers billions of dollars? Shame on him! Next thing you know, they’ll be faulting him for helping some old lady cross the street.

Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), who understandably wants to advocate for enriching a few people in his district at every other American taxpayer’s expense, replies that…

…the field was ‘’tilted to Airbus’’ because the Pentagon did not weigh European subsidies for Airbus in its deliberations — a decision he blamed on McCain. Everett, Wash., is where Boeing would perform much of the tanker work, and Dicks is a senior member of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.

Why should European subsidies be a consideration at all? Or better: if anything, as I noted yesterday, we should welcome European subsidies for our military. We’ve earned them, haven’t we? And since when is the U.S. military supposed to be a huge jobs program for Norm Dicks’s district (or, as a reader from the area points out, the nearby district of Democrat Rick Larsen)? Silly me, I thought that the military’s purpose was to fight and win wars.