"Yes" to the former and the latter is simply expressing his opinion.

Fortunately, for much of the media cued left, opinion can't "LIE" - especially when you simply stick to parroting generic propaganda and other media generated lies and distortions.

Here you go RL. A quick lesson on reading media propaganda. I take it for granted that nearly everyone can do this, but I often, unconsciously, hold people up to my own standard.

U.S. direct spending on the war in Iraq already has surpassed the upper bound of Lindsey's upper bound, and most economists attribute billions more in indirect costs to the war effort. Even if the U.S. exits Iraq within another three years, total direct and indirect costs to U.S. taxpayers will likely by more than $400 billion, and one estimate puts the total economic impact at up to $2 trillion.

Here's the paragraph in Mr. Wolk's raw intent:

Man isn't the US spending a lot of money for a bunch of dumb Iraqis and Afghanis? Bush is really awful. It's an awful lot of money and here are some conjured up and garbled statistics from the CBO (God, how I hate actually having to do work and look stuff up online!) & our one in-house economist (me!) that say 2 trillion dollars could be the cost of this war. Yep, I'm full of it but you folks reading this are such brain-dead liberals you'll buy every word and think you've read pure facts. Ha-ha. Take that Bush. Suckerz! God I write pretty well, don't I. That sounded pretty good. I better make sure I have all those conditional words thrown in there in case an editor actually reads this before it goes online. I certainly hope MSNBC readership doesn't sink lower than it is, because my salary hasn't had a cost of living increase in two years. All we have left are leftist readers. All left are leftists? Dang I'm good. I could schmooze through anything. Maybe I can use that in a piece sometime. God how I hate those rich republicans, but man how I love money!

I've highlighted the key words. Learning to read carefully is taught in elementary school. It is likely that many folks here weren't paying attention and most of those comprise the brain-dead liberal target audience Mr. Wolk markets his spew to.

PS I'm not going to explain the significance of the word indirect in regards to expenditures. I'm going to assume folks here can figure that one out without help from me.