Among the range of topics Barbara O’Brien covered well is the stunning refusal of the top Army guy to submit an impossible budget.

In addition to shortages in manpower and equipment that he’s insisting need to be funded are these key points:

Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army’s budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker’s request a 41% increase over current levels.

And, before that 41% increase gets added, here’s what the GOP Congress did with the smaller, original request:

Pressure on the Army budget has been growing since late May, when the House and Senate appropriations committees proposed defense spending for 2007 of $4 billion to $9 billion below the White House’s original request

But Congress was not alone:

Schoomaker first raised alarms with Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in June after he received new Army budget outlines from Rumsfeld’s office. Those outlines called for an Army budget of about $114 billion, a $2-billion cut from previous guidelines. The cuts would grow to $7 billion a year after six years, the senior Army official said.

And:

Still, some Army officials said Schoomaker expressed concern about recent White House budget moves, such as the decision in May to use $1.9 billion out of the most recent emergency spending bill for border security, including deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops at the Mexican border.

Army officials said $1.2 billion of that money came out of funds originally intended for Army war expenses.

“The president has got to take care of his border mission; he needs to find a source of funds so he can play a zero-sum game — he takes it out of defense,” the senior Army official said. “But when he takes it out of defense, the lion’s share is coming out of the outfit that’s really in extremis in the current operating environment in the war.”

So both the White House and the GOP Congress are underfunding the military budget Bush initially asked for, and even recovering that leaves the Army 41% from its goal.

Shorting funds for the nation’s defense budget: it’s the GOP way. And viewed in perspective, that means the GOP started an unnecessary war by passing off propaganda as intelligence, mismanaged the war and its aftermath, awarded no-bid contracts to cronies, overextended our troops, sent them into battle lacking protective equipment, shorts its own estimates of budget needs for that war and underestimated the actual need by 41%.

That’s the same GOP that nearly half of the nation considers to be masters at military matters. Additionally, Bush’s War leaves 26 million Iraqis endangered daily, it’s resulted in nearly 50,000 civilian deaths, instigated the addition of thousands of new recruits for Al Qaeda, angered our allies, and has done nothing to make our country more secure.

That’s the same GOP that nearly half the country considers to be masters at anti-terrorism.

What they’ve really mastered is deception. And stiffing the Army for the bill.