It’s great that the Blue Dogs are so flush with cash that they have “more money than [they] can spend on [their] own members and endorsed House candidates, sometimes called “Blue pups.”” And it’s a shame that the Senate keeps spiking their efforts to balance the budget. But the Blue Dogs would be a whole lot more convincing in their Budget Hawkishness if they would stop handing the president hundreds of billions of dollars of supplemental funds to continue the war in Iraq.

Look at it this way. The Blue Dogs vote against any legislation that increases spending without offsetting tax increases or budget cuts. They do this on everything, whether it is a bill for medical research, space exploration, or the GI Bill. But they never complain about spending hundrends of billions a year on war that is not paid for with tax increases or budget cuts.

In other words, making war is a higher priority for them than any other issue, and making war is so important that it trumps the very principles that they so pride themselves on. If the Blue Dogs insisted that the war be funded on a Pay-Go basis, the war would have ended two years ago.