The Big Lie gets sandbagged

from crooks and liars
During his speech to the American Legion on Tuesday, President Bush said this:

• 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.

On Wednesday Secretay Gates announced the Army would be doing this:

• The Pentagon has announced that all active-duty Army soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will serve three months longer than expected.

But on March 23 the House passed an Iraq spending bill that includes this:

• The $124 billion legislation includes more than $100 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus billions more than Bush requested for combat equipment and training, for military housing and health care, to address the flaws in mental health care, brain trauma treatment and other issues that surfaced in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal.
• The bill would establish strict standards for resting, training and equipping combat troops before their deployment and lay down binding benchmarks for the Iraqi government, such as assuming control of security operations, quelling sectarian violence and more equitably distributing oil revenue. If progress is not made toward those benchmarks, some troops would be required to come home as early as July.
  

Apparently in Bush World passing a spending bill that fully funds the troops, expands funding for veterans care, demands a one year rest period and seeks to extract the troops from a civil war if the Iraqis don't meet certain benchmarks — all in record time — constitutes "failing to fund our troops" and making "military families wait longer for their loved ones to return," despite Bush's escalation strategy that sends more troops to Iraq and Secretary Gates' decision to extend their tours by three months. Paging Mr. Orwell. Mr. Orwell…

UPDATE: Did the administration plan to announce the tour extension after the veto so as to lay blame on the Democrats? Only to have that plan scrapped because of a leak? Duncan notes the strange timing and ThinkProgress highlights Dana Perino's odd quasi-admission that President Bush didn't know about his own policy. This would all seem to suggest that the plan to blame the tour extension on the Democrats was short-circuited by a DoD leak. And who's politicizing the war and the troops?