Number 108

Kentucky's 108th sacrifice to the insatiable maw of Permanent War is 19-year-old Dustin Gross.

Tom Kenny at WTVQ:

Officials said Dustin Gross, 19, was killed by a roadside bomb.

He graduated last year from Montgomery County High School in Mount Sterling.

Once the school was notified, counselors were brought in to the high school.

The soldier's family released this statement to ABC 36 News:

"We love and are very proud of Dustin, this is very hard for us. We appreciate all the prayers, love and support from our family, friends and the community. We just need to mourn our loss in private at this time."

Alan Grayson, via email:

To little fanfare, President Obama announced last week that he signed an agreement to extend the U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan for twelve more years. No one noted the irony of this, since under our Constitution, President Obama can be President for no more than another 41/2 years.

Also under our Constitution, a treaty requires the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate. (Article II, Section 2, Clause 2). No one in the Obama Administration even took a stab at explaining why this agreement with a foreign power was not being submitted to the Senate for concurrence. But the reason is obvious: the Senate would not concur.

Also under our Constitution, you will search in vain for any provision that authorizes a lengthy military occupation of a foreign country. In fact, the Constitution does not authorize a standing army, much less an army standing in Kabul. In the Bizarro world in which we live, we have 27 Attorneys General challenging the constitutionality of 35 million Americans getting health coverage, but no one challenges the constitutionality of an undeclared war (see Article I, Section 8 on that) that has now entered its second decade.

Presidential candidates Obama and Clinton obviously were separated by race and gender, but one of the few things that separated them on policy was Clinton's vote in favor of the war in Iraq, contrasted with Obama's 2002 statement that the war in Iraq was "dumb." This is what State Senator Barack Obama said, in October 2002, in the Federal Plaza in Chicago:

I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Barack Obama was talking about the war in Iraq. But let's be honest. At this point, after 11 years of pointless, fruitless, endless war, doesn't all of that apply equally to the war in Afghanistan?