The President has requested a $37.5 billion “emergency” war supplemental – $32 billion of which is earmarked for Obama’s Folly in Afghanistan (which will bring the Afghanistan War spending for this fiscal year up to $99 billion). Two reports – from the Congressional Research Service and the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction – make you kind of wonder just why we’re throwing all this money down the Afghan rabbit hole instead of, oh, I dunno, plugging the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico or maybe rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina (I mean, it’s only been 5 years now), or, hey, how about single payer healthcare, building high speed rail, or fixing every crappy bridge and highway in the country?

According to the reports, there’s no exit strategy, we’re not making our timeframes for withdrawing troops, and the “surge” has been quite as wonderful as Saint Stanley McChrystal led us (or some of us, anyway) to believe it would be.

There’s also the matter of seemingly unrealistic goals for training Afghan security forces, poor planning of infrastructure projects, pervasive corruption within the Afghan government and the lack of contracting oversight. Finally there’s the concern that some of the individual funding requests seem inflated, in certain areas the Pentagon isn’t spending the money it already has and billions of dollars in requests don’t appear to genuinely qualify as emergency spending — the only thing Obama vowed he would ever use an emergency spending bill for again.

I predict the supplemental will pass overwhelmingly. I mean, you gotta support the troops, right?

It was too goddamn hot yesterday, it’s gonna be too damn hot today, and it’ll be too dam hot again tomorrow. Expect much whining from me.