When Senator Kerry triumphs in a primary — as he was set to do last night in New York and a series of other states — the speech he unleashes often contains a passage thanking veterans and accusing President Bush of betraying them.

The night of the February 3 primaries, for instance, Mr. Kerry said, “This president doesn’t even mention veterans in his State of the Union message — and then he offers a VA budget that the Veterans of Foreign Wars call a ‘disgrace and a sham.’ If I am president, I pledge that those who wore the uniform of the United States — and those who wear that uniform today — will have a voice and a champion in the Oval Office.”

And a new advertisement e-mailed to supporters by Mr. Kerry carries language claiming that under Mr. Bush, there were “200,000 veterans cut” from the Veterans Administration health system.

That claim is just plain bogus, according to the political fact check project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. That’s not exactly the Republican National Committee; it’s a nonpartisan operation overseen by Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

According to Annenberg’s factcheck.org, “In fact, no veterans have had benefits cut off under Bush. Quite the contrary…spending for veterans benefits has grown 27% since Bush took office, and the ranks of veterans drawing benefits have increased by more than 1 million.”

Al Franken (“Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”), Joe Conason (“Big Lies”), David Corn (“Lies of George W. Bush”), call your office.

The Kerry campaign says the ad is not about what has actually happened, but about the administration’s budget proposal for next fiscal year.

But even if the proposal is passed as written, it would not cut off a single veteran. Instead, it would raise the cost of the VA’s prescription-drug benefit — which now requires no payment to enroll and a $7 copayment for each one-month supply of drugs. Under the Bush plan, veterans would pay $21 a month for basic coverage and a $15 co-payment for a month’s supply of drugs.

And as a result, 200,000 veterans would be expected to leave the system of their own volition and instead take the better benefits they have from other sources.

But the veterans’ benefit under the Bush proposal — which, remember, is just a proposal — would still be better drug coverage than many working Americans get through their jobs and than many retired Americans get from Medicare. While Mr. Kerry is busy attacking Mr. Bush for trying modestly to rein in growth of spending on veterans, the Massachusetts Democrat is also criticizing Mr. Bush for the size of the federal budget deficit.

“George W. Bush is adding a million dollars a minute to the deficit,” Mr. Kerry declared last month in Toledo, Ohio.”I am running for president to bring fiscal sanity back to Washington.” We’re all for fiscal sanity. But how are Congress or the president supposed to attain fiscal sanity when a modest copayment increase, in the context of a 27% overall spending increase, is demagogued as some sort of “disgrace” in which Mr. Bush is somehow stabbing veterans in the back?

Mr. Kerry would outspend Mr. Bush on health care, education, and obviously veterans benefits. He would spend $20 billion more on homeland security, and $50 billion more on aid to states.

He would spend an additional $14 billion on energy and environmental programs and expand paid volunteer programs with more federal money.

According to the Washington Post, which analyzed his plans this week, Mr. Kerry has proposed spending $165 billion more on new programs during his first term than he could save by raising taxes through a repeal of some of the Bush tax cuts and shutting down corporate loopholes.

The next time Mr. Kerry decries Mr. Bush’s deficits in one breath and criticizes what he calls a spending cut in the next, he may want to check into a veterans hospital himself and seek treatment for a severe case of hyperventilation.