Another rumored VP candidate for Obama is Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius. Sebelius first came to my attention last year when she politicized a tornado disaster. For reasons unknown, her emergency management teams blocked volunteers from helping in the devastated town of Greensburg. But what made her famous was her claim that the war in Iraq was hampering recovery, because all the needed equipment was in Iraq. This briefly made her the darling of the media, but it turned out to be false. The Pentagon, when asked, said there was sufficient equipment in Kansas, plus additional resources she could have asked for (but did not) from neighboring states or the Federal government. Indeed, only a tenth of the Kansas National Guard was deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
In fact, Sebelius’s claim never made any sense in the first place. (This was obvious to me when I first saw it on the news.) Units don’t ship out to Iraq with their heavy equipment; they move personnel but use the equipment that is already there. The only way the Kansas National Guard’s equipment could have been in Iraq if it was part of the initial buildup. Even if that were the case (which seems unlikely), they would have had plenty of time by 2007 to replace it, and would have had their own leadership (Sebelius) to blame if they had not.
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