Smarter voters. Smarter politics.

Five years ago, George W. Bush and the GOP excoriated John Kerry for abandoning the troops.

His sin: Kerry voted against an $87 billion war funding bill to protest unrelated tax cuts included in it, then explained it badly by saying, "I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

Shoe, meet the other foot.

Tuesday night, 170 House Republicans pulled a collective Kerry - voting against a $106 billion war funding bill most of them had previously supported, because this version contained money for the International Monetary Fund.

... "This is part of their demagoguery," said [Barney] Frank, an anti-war Democrat who voted against the bill before he voted for it in order to support President Barack Obama's IMF request. "In 1999 - when the Republicans had control [of the House] - they put [IMF funding] in the appropriations bill. It's just hypocrisy. It makes nonsense of them ever accusing the Democrats of not supporting the troops."

Both [Georgia Senators Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson) were strongly opposed to the economic stimulus, declaring the inability of the federal government to encourage job growth. Yet, they say government cuts in production of the F-22 (aka, the "Raptor") would eliminate jobs.

...Besides being hypocritical, these politicians are also just wrong. Military correspondent David Axe says that "ending Raptor production today might not result in a single unemployed aerospace worker."

...Planet Hypocrisy, apparently.

According to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, between now and 2011, the cuts in F-22 productions will slash about 13,000 jobs, but the increase in F-35 production will add 44,000 jobs by that same year.

Furthermore, Republicans that are desperate to keep the F-22s make it sound like our troops are being deprived of important tools for fighting terrorists. While we're not military experts, the F-22s have not been used in either Iraq or Afghanistan, making this argument less than persuasive to us.

An irritated House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Tuesday fired back at Republicans who have charged President Barack Obama with jeopardizing U.S. troops by deliberating over whether to send additional forces to Afghanistan.

Hoyer tore into Republicans - including House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) - for criticizing Obama's approach to a war Hoyer said Republicans "abandoned."

"My Republican colleagues, of course, abandoned their focus on Afghanistan for seven years - seven years - and let it drift, and did not resource it properly, and did not succeed," a terse Hoyer said at his weekly news conference.

..."Gen. McChrystal's assessment says that without timely reinforcements our efforts to deny al Qaeda and the Taliban a safe haven in Afghanistan may end in failure," Boehner said in a statement released on Monday. It followed up on similar statements he made last week.

...Hoyer, who acknowledged he was irritated over the comments, said that such criticism amounted to hypocrisy.

Fred Thompson, the actor and former Republican Senator, told listeners of his radio show Thursday that the war in Afghanistan is "already lost," and put the blame on President Barack Obama's delays in making a decision on a troop surge for the war effort.

...But one of Thompson's points in his polemic -- that "our enemies are emboldened" and "our friends are discouraged" because of Obama's delay -- has critics accusing the former Republican presidential contender of hypocrisy.

Thompson until recently considered criticism of the war effort to be detrimental because it emboldens the US's enemies. As Matt Corley pointed out at ThinkProgress, Thompson fiercely criticized Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2007 when Reid declared outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace to be "incompetent."

"The problem is that every one of Reid's comments I've noted here has also been reported gleefully by Al Jazeera and other anti-American media," Thompson said at the time. "Whether he means to or not, he's encouraging our enemies to believe that they are winning the critical war of will."

"According to Thompson's own logic, his declaration of defeat today - "whether he means to or not" - is "encouraging our enemies to believe that they are winning the critical war of will," Corley writes.

It was hard to stomach the hypocrisy of the red-carpet treatment accorded to Karzai this week. But Obama's upbeat presentation of the Afghan war at their joint press conference was even more jarring. "We [have] succeeded in driving the Taliban out of Marja," he said.

But the Taliban are still active in Marja. The attempt by Gen Stanley McChrystal, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, to impose a "government in a box" in the capital of Helmand province has failed. Some experts predict a similar pattern - that locals will be too scared of the Taliban or too skeptical of the government and the Americans - in a new offensive scheduled for the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar this summer.

Obama's claim that the sacrifices of the young men whom Karzai visited "result over time in more and more of Afghanistan being under the control of the Afghan government . . . and less and less under the control of the Taliban" does not stand up to scrutiny.

When Obama picked Eric Shinseki to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, the left applauded because they liked the contrast with President George W. Bush. Shinseki was their hero because he had told Congress that the Bush administration should send "several hundred thousand" U.S. troops to Iraq in 2003. Bush, Democrats used to argue, should have listened to the generals -- by which they meant Shinseki, not the other generals who suggested lower troop numbers -- and put smart military strategy before politics.

Now there is a push among top military personnel to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond the 68,000 planned by the end of the year.

Funny. You don't hear many Democrats demanding now that Obama put aside politics and give top brass the extra troops they say they need to succeed in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama promised to bring change to Washington if elected president. Greater transparency was a major pledge he repeated across the country from the campaign trail. Mr. Obama vowed to end backroom deals and to open up important negotiations to C-SPAN, allowing voters to see live on TV how government operates with special-interest groups. Most of these commitments were abandoned after Mr. Obama took the oath of office.

Two of the most glaring examples are ethics rules that apply to political appointees who have been lobbyists and the practice of awarding federal contracts without competitive bidding. In both cases, the actual behavior of President Obama stands in stark contrast to the idealistic pronouncements of candidate Obama.

... On Jan. 4, Checchi & Company Consulting, a Washington-based firmed owned by Democratic donor Vincent V. Checchi, was awarded a no-bid contract of more than $24 million to train lawyers and judges in Afghanistan.

Some no-bid contracts may be necessary for efficiency's sake, and frequently the best nominees are those whose government service is bolstered by previous related work in the private sector. It's Mr. Obama's hypocrisy that's galling more than the practice.