Evan Bayh: You have to pay for everything, except wars, which are awesome.

Glenn Greenwald, who is occasionally prone to hyperbole, lays into Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) over Bayh's proclamation that he is a deficit hawk, even though he thinks wars should be started without any thought to funding them:

Bayh wants to send other people into every proposed war he can find and keep them there forever ever without ever bearing any of the costs himself -- not in military service for him or his family nor even in higher taxes to pay for his glorious wars. Sacrifice is for everyone other than Evan Bayh and his friends. He runs around praising himself as a "deficit hawk" while recklessly supporting wars and indefinite occupations that the country can't afford and which drive us further into debt. He feigns concern over the "deficit" only when it comes time to deny ordinary Americans benefits which he and his family already possess in abundance.

Much of this comes from Bayh's appearance on Fox News Sunday, which included this exchange with host Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: Senator Bayh, you brought up the question of cost, and the administration has put the cost -- and this is kind of astonishing to, I think, a lot of people -- $1 million per soldier per year, so if you sent 30,000 soldiers, that would be a $30 billion price tag.

Now, some top Democrats are talking about the idea -- the new idea of a war tax to pay for the escalation in Afghanistan. Good idea?

BAYH: No, I don't think it's a good idea, not at this point, Chris. First of all, you need to provide for the nation's security regardless of your financial situation, and there's no bigger deficit hawk in Congress than I am.

I think we need to start coming to grips with this. We're going to have a big vote coming up on the debt ceiling. I don't think we should vote to raise the debt ceiling until we have a strategy in place to get our deficits down.

So we've got to take the fiscal situation seriously, but, number one, national security comes first.

Number two, we've got to look at cutting spending in other parts of the budget before we even talk about raising taxes.

If these wars were not wars of choice (and, in fact, all wars involve some degree of choice about how resources are allocated and utilized), it would be easier to argue that the cost is not something we can worry about at the moment; but seeing as Iraq turned out to be the textbook case of a war of choice and Afghanistan has increasingly looked like one, it's hard to argue that we simply must fight these fights without any concern over the cost in blood and treasure.