Bend over and kiss it goodbye.

When the terrorists strike again, or the inevitable hurricane comes ashore in five months or so, once again we will have a new way to measure the costs of the Iraq war.

Since the war began, the Guard has been badly stripped of equipment and resources even as it is tasked with one of the most important on-call jobs on American soil: to be the first line of homeland defense and security in the event of a catastrophic terror attack or a devastating national emergency such as Hurricane Katrina......

Non-deployed Guard units have just 5 percent of the lightweight rifles and 14 percent of the machine guns they are authorized to have.

Units nationwide have just 8 percent of the flatbed semi-trailers they are authorized to have and 10 percent of the Humvees.

And despite the fact the Guard likely would be the first force to respond to a terrorist attack, which many experts fear could involve the use of chemical or biological weapons, its units have only 14 percent of their authorized chemical decontamination equipment and virtually none of the chemical agent monitoring equipment they are supposed to have.

I mean, holy crap! I knew there had been "stripping" of National Guard equipment for Iraq, but just what resources have been left to protect America. The terrorists had better be content to fight us over there, as George Bush theorizes, because this administration's Iraq failure has destroyed the means for us to fight them over here.

(By the way, with no real winter down here on the gulf coast, the gulf waters are warm, and they're predicting a particularly nasty hurricane season. I even saw one article theorizing that the conditions may be right for another hurricane to hit New York.)