Here is How Conservatives "Support the Troops"

'Ole Rumsfeld, the cabinet member who failed the worst, and therefore is staying the longest, is at it again. Here's what, apparently, the Bush regime considers "supporting the troops."

Disgruntled U.S. soldiers complained to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
on Wednesday about the lack of armor for their vehicles and long deployments,
drawing a blunt retort from the Pentagon chief.

"You go to war with the Army you have," he said in a rare public airing of rank-and-file concerns among the troops.

Yeah! That'll learn those darned troops for complaining! After all, they should have thought of that before we went to war...

Oh, wait. Isn't the job of the Commander-in-Chief and the Secretary of Defense to think about things like that? And to take such things into account when planning an operation? Wasn't it Rumsfeld, his goofy sidekick Wolfowitz, and Bush who told us this would be a quick, simple operation, and who therefore didn't get the Army ready for a long, big deployment like this?

Mr. Rumsfeld, the "Army you have" is not the Army you drew randomly in a game of Risk. The "Army you have" is the Army you are responsible for manning, equipping, and preparing. If soldiers don't have what they need, it isn't the fault of the winds of fortune. It is your fault and you are a coward of the first order for failing to take responsibility for it.

But 'Ole Rummy isn't done there:

Army Spec. Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team -- composed mainly of citizen soldiers of the Tennessee Army National Guard -- asked
Rumsfeld in a question-and-answer session why vehicle armor is still in
short supply, nearly two years after the start of the war.

"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal
and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" asked
Wilson, 31, of Nashville, Tenn. A big cheer arose from the approximately
2,300 soldiers who assembled to hear the secretary of
defense...

Rumsfeld replied that troops should make the best of the conditions they face and
said the Army was pushing makers of vehicle armor to produce it as fast as possible.

And, he added, armor isn't always a savior against roadside bombs, which have killed and maimed hundreds, if not thousands, of troops since summer 2003. "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can be blown up," Rumsfeld said.

What? Okay. He didn't just say all that, did he? He did?

So, first off, whose fault is it that the government didn't ramp up the production of vehicle armor before the invasion of Iraq? Or at any time after the invasion until now? We've been hearing reports of complaints about the lack of armored vehicles since the President stood on an aircraft carrier and proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" and you're just now doing something about it? Cripes, this guy makes Hitler look like a military mastermind.

And of course a tank can be blown up no matter how armored!!! What does that have to do with anything? By that logic, we wouldn't need to armor tanks at all! For that matter, we wouldn't need tanks, because all tanks are are armored fighting vehicles! That's why tank resources are called armor for the love of...! Why did we invest so much money in developing stuff like reflexive armor for our vehicles if armor is irrelevant and meaningless?

Do you think Rumsfeld really doesn't understand that armor makes it much more difficult to blow a vehicle up and thus much less likely that it will get blown up? Or do you think he is such a freakin' mouth-breathing idiot sucking the raw egg of ineptitude that he really thinks that unless armor is absolutely impervious it is useless?

I know how we can find out. Let's take Rummie out back and tell him we're going to set off a bomb. He can either stand out in the open when we set it off, sit in an unarmored humvee, or sit in an armored humvee. If he really, sincerely believes the crap he said, he will just stand there and let us put the bomb next to him or climb into the unarmored humvee. But, if he gets into the armored humvee, we'll know he is simply a hypocrite trying to cover up for mistakes he made going into this war by putting the responsibility for them on the shoulders of the soldiers off dying in Iraq for this politically-motivated, unnecessary war.

I can't think of much that has come out of the Bush regime that has made me more angry than this. The Republicans are the ones who "support the troops." That is a lie on par with "I will stop with Poland."