Playing Politics With The Troops

Atrios explains:

I write for my regular readers, who I assume are generally up to speed with the current events that I cover, and therefore don't feel the need to state and restate everything all of the time. So, when I suggested that the Bushies and Gates were pissed when someone in the Pentagon had prematurely leaked their deployment extension plan, something Gates acknowledged, because they had intended to announce the plans and then blame the Democrats for it, I knew that my readers would know this was a plausible theory because Bush had said:

"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. This is unacceptable. It's unacceptable to me, it's unacceptable to our veterans, it's unacceptable to our military families, and it's unacceptable to many in this country."

In other words, they were planning to implement an "unacceptable" policy and then blame the Democrats, but the Pentagon leaker made that rather difficult.