SocraticGadfly: Obama signs highly flawed Af-Pak bill

June 25, 2009

Obama signs highly flawed Af-Pak bill

President Obama has signed into law the flawed $106 billion bill supporting continued warmaking in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It’s deeply flawed for a couple of reasons.

One is it doesn’t have more of an Obama Administration war plan attached to pound sand down the rathole of Afghanistan.

Second is the attached cars-for-clunkers bill which will, among other things, allow Americans to upgrade old SUVs to new ones getting just 1mpg better, even as, with his other hand, Obama tries to force bankrupt Chrysler and GM make and sell more in the way of fuel-efficient cars.

Third is the unstated backdrop of this bill having once been held hostage to the Lieberman-Graham amendment to censor the publication of all the Abu Ghraib 2.0 pictures, followed by Obama breaking that logjam with his pledge to presidentially censor them.

Fourth was the failure of enough antiwar Democrats to actually be antiwar, team with Republicans mad about the IMF funding rider on the bill, and thus kill it.

This is without a doubt the worst non-fiscal bill to be passed, and signed into law, so far in the Obama Administration.

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