From the Derpartment of "you can't make this shit up."
Tax-cut magician Paul Ryan is accusing the Joint Chiefs of Staff of being dishonest in their budget request, and the reason is --wait for it-- they're requesting less spending than expected!
Under normal circumstances you would assume that less spending would be music to the ears of a spending-obsessed man like Paul Ryan, but not in this case. In this case, an agreement between the Joint Chiefs and President Obama, wherein they agree to less spending, must be some kind of conspiracy.
House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., claimed Thursday that senior U.S. military officials and commanders were being dishonest in their budget requests to Congress.
“We don’t believe the generals are giving us their true budget,” Ryan said at the National Journal Live Budget Policy summit, adding, “I think there’s a lot of budget smoke and mirrors in the Pentagon’s budget.” [...]
In his FY2013 budget, Ryan proposed dismantling the automatic sequestration of defense spending, replacing those cuts with unspecified savings from mandatory programs.
It gets better.
The spending levels being proposed by the Pentagon are the same levels previously agreed to, by both parties, under the Budget Control Act (the debt-ceiling deal).
Now that the Republicans have officially abandoned the debt-ceiling framework and have, once again, voted to pass Paul Ryan's Medicare-killing budget along party lines, they're pretending that automatically-triggered spending cuts at the Pentagon were never agreed to, even though they were.
By the way, I hear accusing your most senior commanders of lying and producing fraudulent budget requests is a great way to "support the troops."