Another Veto Threat

Scorpio says Bush hates the troops, but I don’t think he has ever cared about them enough to hate them.

CNN as a slightly different version of the same Associated Press report: New war funding bill unacceptable to White House

President Bush would veto any bill drafted by House Democratic leaders that would fund the Iraq war only into the summer months, his spokesman said Wednesday.

And Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate committee that such short-term funding would be very disruptive and “have a huge impact” on contracts to repair and replace equipment. The Defense Department, he said, just doesn’t “have the agility to manage a two month appropriation.”

One simple question, after four years why is the Iraq conflict still being funded by “emergency” bills?

This funding should have been part of the regular appropriation bill, which, I admit, wouldn’t have helped much since the Repub-led 109^th Congress didn’t pass that bill back in September as required, but left it for the 110^th Congress, but that’s where this spending should have been.

I know that part of the answer is to hide the true deficit, because emergency bills are not counted in that bogus number – they are the surprise icky center surrounded by a depressing outer shell. But installation commanders and the maintenance people can come up with fairly hard budget numbers fairly quickly to plug in to an annual appropriation, and this hasn’t been done.

The problem of the repair and replacement of equipment was highlighted by General Peter Schoomaker some time ago as he appealed directly to Congress for more money because Rumsfeld kept cutting it from the Army’s budget. That should have been in the regular budget.

It isn’t the military, these budget problems are a result of the abysmal performance of the political appointees in the Department of Defense. The military and career civil service can provide a decent budget in their sleep, because they have been doing it a very long time.