Remember, up is down: I didn’t catch this latest rhetorical folly from the president yesterday because I can no longer abide his histrionical declamations.Thankfully, someone at MSNBC’s Countdown who was paid to listen to the president’s address to the American Legion picked up on this beaut of a logical disconnect, which Keith Olbermann reported last night.
“The bottom line is this: Congress’s failure to fund our troops will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. Others could see their loved ones headed back to war sooner than anticipated…”
Pres. Bush
Here’s what the president said yesterday:
BUSH: If Congress fails to pass a bill I can sign by mid-May, the problems grow even more acute. The Army will be forced to consider slowing or even freezing funding for its depots, where the equipment our troops depend on is repaired. They will have to consider delaying or curtailing the training of some active duty forces, reducing the availability of those the force — of those forces to deploy overseas. And the Army may also have to delay the formation of new brigade combat teams, preventing us from getting those troops into the pool of forces that are available to deploy.
So what does that mean? These things happen: Some of our forces now deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq may need to be extended, because other units are not ready to take their places. In a letter to Congress, the Army Chief of Staff, Pete Shoemaker, recently warned, “Without approval of the supplemental funds in April, we will be forced to take increasingly draconian measures, which will impact Army readiness and impose hardships on our soldiers and their families.”
The bottom line is this: Congress’s failure to fund our troops will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. Others could see their loved ones headed back to war sooner than anticipated…
Logically, if there is no money, the war has to end pretty quickly — right? And yet the president says that if funding is cut off, the war will slow down and therefore last longer. But the House Democrats’ plan would have U.S. combat troops pulling out altogether in March 2008.
The president talks about the lack of funds “delaying,” “reducing” and “curtailing” the military. But the funding cuts are targeted specifically at fighting in Iraq. All other military programs covered in the supplemental are fully funded.
Leaving Iraq would free up 120,000 troops as well as the billions we’re flushing down the drain over there every month — resources we can redeploy against real threats to our national security.
