From a reader:
Dear Jonah,
I think you give Nick Confessore too much credit for his straw man. While the most basic formulation of spending = support is flawed, that is not the case the Republicans are making. The ads and stories I am reading are very specific that what Kerry was against, at the height of the cold war, were the new weapons programs that helped modernize our military to win the cold war, and are now the core of our military capabilities. There were not alternatives to these programs at the time, so had they been defeated we would not have many of these weapons systems. Some of the things Kerry wanted to eliminate were the Blackhawk hellicopter, the Bradley troop carrier, the F/A-18 fighter and the Aegis guided- missile destroyer. There is a very big difference between wanting to stop development of new systems to modernize our military and cutting back on the production of the actual weapons AFTER the cold war as Cheney did.