President Obama and Secretary of Defense Gates are defending the indefensible, namely, defense. Against clamor to cut the Pentagon’s bloated budget coming from both the right and the left, from anti-DOD liberals, antiwar activists, ultra-conservative Tea Party types who want to slash all government spending and libertarians who propose cutting defense by 90 percent, the White House and Gates are sounding like, well, reactionaries. Gates, who’d earlier warned that even modest cuts in the 2011 budget for defense could be “catastrophic,” said today that the result of cutting Pentagon spending could be “tragic”: