What if we told the Pentagon to hold a bake sale when it needed extra money?

President Bush is asking for $81.9 billion in additional spending before the ink has even dried on the the 2006 $419.3 billion Pentagon budget.

That's like your landlord telling you the rent is $800, and then when you move in, he says he's going to charge you an extra $150 for cleaning expenses.

Why do we keep giving the military hundreds of billions of dollars a year for preparedness, and then when we ask them to do the job we've already paid them to do, they say they need more money?

Notwithstanding the fact that I was opposed to the Iraq War at the first hint of President Bush's neoconservative agenda, I do support the effort to find and destroy Al Quaeda cells. But why should we put up with a shell game in which the Pentagon takes half of our tax dollars for crazy weapons programs, and then tells us it doesn't have enough money to put boots on the ground when they need to be deployed?