Is there any "debate" about the Bushies' systematic plundering of the National Guard? Haven't they merely lost another bet that it wouldn't matter?

By Monday morning, equipment was finally rolling into Greensburg, Kansas.

"I have said for nearly two years, and will continue to say, that we have a looming crisis on our hands when it comes to National Guard equipment in Iraq and our needs at home."
--Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, late Tuesday

"There's a lot of stuff available."
--White House Lying Scumbag Tony Snow, after rattling off a list of equipment currently possessed by the Kansas National Guard (hey, he's just paid to be a lying scumbag, not to know anything about how an actual state might need to respond to an actual disaster)

The strange headline on the solid report in this morning's New York Times reads:

KANSAS TORNADO
RENEWS DEBATE
ON GUARD AT WAR

Debate? Is there really a debate? When Chimpy the Prez decided to compensate for what surely must be the World's Smallest Penis by shocking and awing Iraq, the thieving sycophants who planned his war always made it part of their strategy to plunder the states' National Guard forces. They did it, we've always known it, and there have always been people--including a number of governors, not least among them Governor Sebelius--who've been screaming bloody murder about it, warning that the day would come when we would pay the price in Guard unpreparedness.

The Bush regime's response was: "Fuck you."

Is this what you would properly call a debate?

As Susan Saulny and Jim Rutenberg report in the Times:

For months, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and other governors have warned that their state National Guards are ill-prepared for the next local disaster, be it a tornado a flash flood or a terrorist's threat, because of large deployments of their soldiers and equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then, last Friday night, a deadly tornado all but cleared the small town of Greensburg off the Kansas map. With 80 square blocks of the small farming town destroyed, Ms. Sebelius said her fears had come true: The emergency response was too slow, she said, and there was only one reason.

"As you travel around Greensburg, you'll see that city and county trucks have been destroyed," Ms. Sebelius, a Democrat, said Monday. "The National Guard is one of our first responders. They don't have the equipment they need to come in, and it just makes it that much slower."

For nearly two days after the storm, there was an unmistakable emptiness in Greensburg, a lack of heavy machinery and an army of responders. By Sunday afternoon, more than a day and a half after the tornado, only about half of the Guard troops who would ultimately respond were in place.

It was not until Sunday night that significant numbers of military vehicles started to arrive, many streaming in a long caravan from Wichita about 100 miles away.

And as the Times team (which included reporters all over the country) also reports:

Two recent reports have raised questions about Guard preparedness. An independent military assessment council, the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, released a report in March that stated: "In particular, the equipment readiness of the Army National Guard is unacceptable and has reduced the capability of the United States to respond to current and additional major contingencies, foreign and domestic."

Another report, released in January by the Government Accountability Office, concluded that the ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have "significantly decreased" the amount of equipment available for National Guard units not deployed overseas, while the same units face an increasing number of threats at home.

Actually, it makes sense that it's equipment more than personnel that's at stake in the Bush regime's plundering of the National Guard. Heavy reliance on National Guard and reserve units has certainly helped the regime wage war on the sly, since that's made it unnecessary for its war machine to be knocking on Middle America's doors for soldiers, and anyway, when it's not with regard to personnel that the regime is attempting to fight a war on the cheap.

After all, the heavy reliance on manpower provided by the famous contractors is surely wildly more expensive than equivalent military personnel would be. But by "appropriating" heaps of National Guard equipment, that's that much less money the regime has to squeeze out of Congress in emergency appropriations to fund its Middle East fun.

Wasn't it that pompous fraud then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who told us that you go to war with the military you have? Now we know that that includes "with the equipment you can steal from American states."

Interestingly, the Times report notes:

Last year, all 50 governors signed a letter to President Bush asking for the immediate re-equipping of Guard units sent overseas. But officials in several states, including Kentucky, Minnesota and Texas, said Tuesday that they were not facing equipment shortages.

It just so happens that, apart from the governor of Kentucky being a known crook and the governor of Texas being a known dimwit, all three of those governors are Republicans. This raises the even more unsavory possibility that the Bush regime has been targeting the ferocity of its raping and pillaging of the states' National Guard units on political grounds.

But the main storyline is simple: The Bush regime knew exactly what it was doing to the National Guard, thought it could get away with it, and now as usual is trying to bully, lie, and bluff its way through. There's even that hint that Uncle Karl Rove has sent the good folk of Kansas--and perhaps other states as well--a message that this is what happens when you elect a governor of the Devil's, er, "Democrat" party.

Governor Sebelius has never shown signs of being a pushover, though. I like to think that the regime slimeballs may have met a more formidable opponent than they're used to on the domestic political front. I sure hope she crushes their balls--and Chimpy's tiny penis too, if anyone can find it.