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Let me tell you a story.
It was 1978, and I was on a training exercise just south of the DMZ in Korea during the nadir of Jimmy’s Carter’s post-Vietnam military.
We lacked for everything except pity for what a pitiful state America’s Army had fallen into.
America itself was not in much better shape, hammered by economic “stagflation” and moral malaise.
There, on the coldest night of my life, covered in frozen mud so thick I looked like I was wearing a mud jumpsuit, the mess hall delivered a steak dinner.
That shoe-leather tough, scrawny piece of meat was one of the best meals of my life.
Thoughts of it returned to me this week, when leftist lunatics started caterwauling in unison about alleged luxuries they’d unearthed in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s budget.
A generation earlier, my dad was a couple hundreds of miles north on a frozen, naked windswept ridge overlooking the Yalu River, right before a massive Chinese and North Korean counterattack that would force him to march hundreds of miles south on a frostbitten foot.
Somehow, on that Thanksgiving Day in 1950, somebody got my dad a memorable plateful of cooked turkey and a spoon of cranberry sauce.
Common practices
During World II, at Monte Cassino, not far from the villages where my family emigrated from to the United States, a GI could walk off the hillside in the middle of a battle, slipping on sharp rocks covered by mud and human blood, down to the valley where a Donut Dollie would hand that grimy, smelly GI Joe a hot cup of coffee and a fresh doughnut.
Americans have a long tradition of getting a comforting meal and a moment of normality to the boys and girls in uniform, extending back to the harshest days of Valley Forge.
There may be a lot of things in America to complain about.
This is not one of them.
Trying to turn spending on an occasional steak and lobster dinner for our troops into some kind of profligate government waste is beyond the pale of indefensible.
This week, while Americans grapple with the war in Iran, spiking oil prices, massive corruption in blue states and other genuine problems, the left has topped its agenda with “Lobster-gate.”
They’re claiming to be outraged that the Department of War’s reported end-of-year 2025 spending included $6.9 million for lobster tails during a single month last year, plus more on rib-eye steaks, doughnuts, furniture and musical instruments.
Never mind that it’s a common government practice to hold off on nice-to-have expenses until the end of a budget cycle, to ensure there’s enough money for mission-essential items.
It’s also common, indeed righteous, for the US military to treat our troops to a high-end meal in place of their usual grub every now and again — especially when we’re about to send them into harm’s way, as our nation has done in Venezuela and Iran these last few weeks.
We all know why some whiz kids on the left dreamed up this smear campaign: It’s their latest gotcha assault.
Fake outrage
In the politics of reckless political desperation, truth is not only the first casualty; truth is little more than acceptable collateral damage.
Apparently, frustrated that President Trump was not all over the Epstein files, horrified that America may not lose a war against a finalist for the title of the world’s most evil regime and not satisfied with defunding the TSA and the Coast Guard, the left’s smear merchants needed a new outrage.
They never paused to consider that they were committing an unforgivable political sacrilege.
And they have so little understanding of our military that they had no idea they’d done so.
The faux surf-and-turf scandal will evaporate as soon as the whiz kids can think of a new horror to froth over.
More important is what this tells us about the American left.
They’re not even trying to whip up true popular support for their causes.
They’re just looking for any opportunity to deploy their bought-and-paid crisis actors into the field — lemmings who will no doubt now ditch their Defund ICE / Save Gaza / Hands Off Iran placards for shiny new No Steak signs.
James Jay Carafano, an expert in national security and foreign policy, is a 25-year US Army veteran.