Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) recently was forced to apologize for portraying the Pentagon leadership as liars on matters of the budget.
The problem he had with their numbers was that they were lower than his preferred spending levels over the next decade.
The fracas drew attention to the hollowness of the GOP mantra that we should always "listen to the generals." So often have we heard this phrase that Ryan's blunder was an extremely important exposure of the Republican party's inherent hypocrisy on the issue of waste.
Keying off of Gordon Adams' take on the affair last week, Stan Collender fires with both barrels (pardon the expression):
"In the now closer-to-four-than-three decades I've been involved with the federal budget in some way, it has never ceased to amaze me that congressional Republicans are able to detect waste, fraud, abuse and overspending from a mile away when it involves a domestic program but are completely deaf, dumb and blind to the same thing when it involves the Pentagon. Why is it, for example, that an extra sandwich in a school lunch program is waste while an extra missile that will never be used and wasn't requested by DOD is vital to national security?"
There is no rational, much less decent, explanation. It's simply how these bastards operate.
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