An addiction to Oil has come to undue this nation in more ways than one.

Over a Trillion wasted on Iraq and Afghanistan, over 5000 dead Americans, hundreds of thousands of others dead too.

That's $1,000,000,000,000 toward war. And now, as promised they wouldn't, its time for another supplemental war bill to fund the appetite for war.

Alan Grayson:

On May 30, 2010, at 10:06 a.m, the direct cost of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan will hit $1 trillion. And in a few weeks, the House of Representatives will be asked to vote for $33 billion of additional "emergency" supplemental spending to continue the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. There will be the pretense of debate - speeches on the floor of both chambers, stern requests for timetables or metrics or benchmarks - but this war money will get tossed in the wood chipper without difficulty, requested by a President who ran on an anti-war platform. Passing this legislation will mark the breaking of another promise to America, the promise that all war spending would be done through the regular budget process. Not through an off-budget swipe of our Chinese credit card.

The war money could be used for schools, bridges, or paying everyone's mortgage payments for a whole year. It could be used to end federal income taxes on every American's first $35,000 of income, as my bill, the War Is Making You Poor Act, does. It could be used to close the yawning deficit, supply health care to the unemployed, or for any other human and humane purpose.

Instead, it will be used for war. Because, as Orwell predicted in 1984, we've reached the point where everyone thinks that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Why?

Not because Al Qaeda was sheltered in Iraq. It wasn't. And not because Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. It isn't. Bush could never explain why we went to war in Iraq, and Obama can't explain why we are 'escalating' in Afghanistan.

So, why? Why spend $1 trillion on a long, bloody nine-year campaign with no justifiable purpose?

Remember 9/11, the day that changed everything? That was almost a decade ago. Bush's response was to mire us in two bloody wars, wars in which we are still stuck today. Why?

Betrayal of principle.

Now, the Obama defenders will jump in here to defend him, saying that Obama actually ran on escalating the war in Afghanistan. They will ignore the fact that Obama ran on an escalation of about 10,000 troops at one time, and not the bait and switch of the equivalent of moving 100,000 troops from Iraq into Afghanistan.

The Obama-led strategy of the Democrats on the wars has been nothing short of an entire failrure of principle for the Democratic Party. What became of the Party, led by Reid, to cut funding off of the war in 2007?

That was clearly the Democratic opinion in 2007. Its what led to all of the 2008 primary candidates to endorse pulling out of Iraq with some sort of timetable. Obama's going into Afghanistan was mentioned a couple of times, and always in the context of "two brigades" of troops "and some helicopters" or the like. Never as a war the equivalent of the disaster that became of the invastion of Iraq.

I thought it cynical politics at the time, not believing that Obama was a  really a believer in Bush's military solution of nation-building through billions of dollars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. But, it's clearly a continuation of policy.

This is not the first betrayal, that came in 2009 already, the War Funding off the books. So we have another vote of principle upcoming. We'll see who shows up.