Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In 2008, Candidate Obama assured us the war in Iraq was the wrong war. He wanted to fight the right war in Afghanistan, against the Taliban.
In 2014, President Obama surrendered the Taliban high leadership back to the enemy and announced American troops will be leaving Afghanistan.
He picked the war. He lost it. His legacy.
Joe Doakes

Even those of us who tacitly agreed that Afghanistan needed the most emphasis have to be disappointed by Obama’s performance.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The attack on our consulate in Benghazi was long ago.  The President tweets his concern for kidnapped girls.  These incidents are reported as separate dots. Wretchardconnects the dots.

Boko Haram swears alliegence to Al Queda.  Yes, that Al Queda, the terrorist group that President Obama supposedly obliterated when he ordered Osama Bin Laden dead.   But it’s not dead.

Al Queda attacked our Benghazi consulate and dragged our ambassador through the streets.  It arms Boko Harum with weapons stolen in Libya so Boko Harum can kidnap Christian girls to sell into sexual slavery to Muslim slave-owners, all of which they justify by the Muslim religion, which we dare not offend, so Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State and Barack Obama as President didn’t name Boko Harum a terrorist group long ago.

The Benghazi attack and the kidnapped girls are battles in the war Fundamentalist Islam is waging against us, a war we refuse to admit exists and therefore refuse to fight.

This will not end well.

Joe Doakes

As I used to tell my “pacifist” friends (and some of my “anarcho-libertarian” acquaintances today) – just because you eschew war doesn’t mean war eschews you.

Citizen militias have been winning parts of Mexico back from the narcotraficantes.  

To do this, they’ve broken what pass for “the rules”; they’ve fought violence with violence; they’ve used weapons that are utterly illegal in Mexico (assault rifles, obtained by the same illegal means that people always use to obtain guns where guns are banned). 

And it’s worked. 

And it worked against a backdrop of, at best, government incompetence (they’ve never been able to make a dent in the narcotraficantes stranglehold on the area) or complicity (the narcos have bought off or co-opted vast swathes of Mexico’s government, including judges, law enforcement and the military). 

So now that the government is trying to co-opt the one thing that’s worked against the cartels…

The government will go town by town to organize and recruit the new rural forces.

“This is a process of giving legal standing to the self-defense forces,” said vigilante leader Estanislao Beltran.

… is it surprising that some of the locals aren’t buying it?

But tension remained on Friday in the coastal part of the state outside the port of Lazaro Cardenas, where other “self-defense” groups plan to continue as they are, defending their territory without registering their arms. Vigilantes against the demobilization have set up roadblocks in the coastal town of Caleta.

“We don’t want them to come, we don’t recognize them,” vigilante Melquir Sauceda said of the government and the new rural police forces. “Here we can maintain our own security. We don’t need anyone bringing it from outside.”

This is precisely why the Second Amendment is, and must always be, a right of the people; because government at best is modestly capable of doing the right thing, and at worst is as bad as or worse than the problem, when it isn’t itself the problem.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama isn’t just the First Black President, he may also be the Most Belligerent. Aside from the ordinary garrison troops at US bases and embassies around the world, and not counting bombing sorties flown by drones, this President has dispatched American troops to put boots on the ground in conflicts in:

Iraq

Afghanistan

Pakistan

Kyrgyzstan

Egypt

Libya

Yeman

Sudan

Uganda

Central African Republic

Poland

and with this week’s the new agreement, the Philippines.

Can he get another Nobel Peace Prize, please? Because for a man this devoted to peace, one just doesn’t seem like enough.

To be fair, he didn’t start all of these conflicts, and wasn’t the first to send US troops to all of them.

To be even more fair, he got elected promising a foreign policy that relied less on military force and breaking things and making them go boom.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

US sent 300 paratroopers to Poland to serve as a trip-wire against Russian aggression. Washington Post explains the reasoning.

It’s a dumb idea.

The trip-wire concept is simple: if the Russians attack and kill our 300 guys, the American public will be so outraged that Congress will Declare War as young people run to the recruiting offices and the sleeping American giant will roar to life to crush the Russians in a savage but fully justified act of revenge.

Never happen. Not in modern America. Democrats won’t declare war, Code Pinkers won’t support war, Millennials won’t go to war. Instead, the public consensus will be “Those paratroopers volunteered to serve in the armed forces so they assumed the risk of being killed. We’re not going to suffer for their bad career choice.”

Now, here’s the scary part: are SITD readers the only people who understand this? Does the US military command know those troops are twisting in the wind but they’re sending them anyway because the WaPo foreign policy wallahs want it? Seems like a major breach of faith to me.

Worse, do the Russians know it’s a bluff? Are they already planning how to invade around our people, knowing there only risk is a scolding from the Teleprompter in Chief or his lurching Secretary of State?

It was bad enough when the President’s idiotic foreign policy got our Ambassador killed. We don’t need another 300 bodies to confirm his error.

Joe Doakes

Reading history, it’s hard to avoid a key fact; most wars are backed into.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The traditional High and Tight would solve this problem, if we weren’t trying so hard to be stylish and ethnic that we can’t figure out how to be a soldier.

I recommend every non-minority officer above Captain be fired and we pay millions of dollars in reparations to the women whose feelings were hurt.

Joe Doakes

Perhaps a better answer: since the military’s most elite troops – “Delta” and “Seal Team Six” (neither unit has actually gone by either name in decades) wear their hair long and even wear beards, clearly the answer is to turn the entire Army and Navy into Deltas and Seals.

Then everyone will be happy.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is sitting at a stoplight when his car is jolted from behind. 

Wearily, BERG gets out of his car and walks to the car that has bumped his rear bumper.  Avery LIBRELLE sits at the driver’s seat, still furiously typing on a mobile device.

BERG:  (Recognizes LIBRELLE):  Oh, jeez.   You know you slid into my…

LIBRELLE:  Wait!  (furiously finishes typing comment onto news website).  OK.  What now?

BERG:  Well, you sorta slid into my back bumper.  (Checks bumper).  Not much damage, but still…

LIBRELLE:  Yeah, well, I had to comment on this Ukraine thing.  The Administration is doing a heck of a job.

BERG:  The Administration is doing nothing at all.

LIBRELLE:  Well, we only have so much we can do.  We have no credibility.

BERG:   I’ll say.  Obama has pretty much…

LIBRELLE:   No, you racist, it’s not Obama.  It’s the US.  We have no credibility on human rights issues.

BERG:  What now?

LIBRELLE:  Look at slavery!  Look at what we did with the Indians.

BERG:  Wait.  Slavery – which we fought a civil war to abolish 150 years ago – and the wars against the Native Americans, which ended 120 years ago, destroy our credibility today?

LIBRELLE:  Absolutely.  And the people of the Crimea just voted, 93% of them, to rejoin Russia.

BERG: In an election in which they were surrounded by Russian troops.

LIBRELLE:  So that invalidates the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, then?

BERG: (slowly shakes head).  You do realize that justifying a larger, aggressive nation swallowing up parts of smaller nations based purely on ethnicity is how the west rationalized Germany taking the Sudetenland, don’t you?

LIBRELLE:  Bla bla bla.  Russia is liberating Crimea from the Ukrainitarians, who unlawfully stole it from them.

BERG:   OK, about that.  Let’s run, for sake of argument, with the idea that slavery and the conquest of the American Indians invalidates America’s claim to being a moral player.

LIBRELLE:  It does.

BERG:   Even though it happened over 110 years ago, and our society has spent the better part of the past 40-50 years atoning for both, which is something no other society on earth haseverdone for societies they previously conquered and enslaved.

LIBRELLE:   Bla bla bla.  Do you have a point?

BERG:   I always have a point.  You do realize that the reason the Crimea is ethnically Russian is that the Russians murdered, starved and deported the vast majority of the non-Russian natives of the region back in the twenties through the forties, and shipped in ethnic Russians to replace them, don’t you?  That is to say, within the past seventy to ninety years, they either murdered the people who lived there at the time – the Tatars, the Turks, the German-Russians and all other other ethnic groups that used to live there – in an ethnic cleansing no less brutal than Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears, but within living memory, as they were also starving Ukraine into submission – or shipped them off to the steppes and a fate not one iota less horrible than slavery?

LIBRELLE:  Your point?

BERG:  You deny the US has any moral weight, but ignore vastly worse and more recent crimes to fit your narrative.

LIBRELLE:   Bla bla bla.  Hey, you have insurance, right?  Could you get this one?

(And SCENE)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Heller and McDonald established that the Second Amendment guarantees a personal right to bear firearms, subject to some restrictions.  Good start.

All Constitutional rights are subject to some restrictions and Americans are okay with that.  Everybody knows you can’t yell “Fire” in a crowded theater (well, you can, but when you’re arrested for causing a riot, you can’t use the First Amendment as your defense).   Some restrictions are so obviously sensible nobody argues them.  But the devil being in the details, we need to know how carefully the restrictions are drawn.  The Constitution doesn’t say so the Supreme Court has interpreted it for us.

Restrictions on Fundamental Rights (such as First Amendment speech and religion) must hold up under “strict scrutiny” – there must be a compelling government interest, which the restriction is narrowly tailored to achieve, and for which no less restrictive alternative exists.  Restrictions on Sex issues (e.g. 14th Amendment sex discrimination)  must hold up under “intermediate scrutiny” – there must be an important government interest to which the restriction is substantially related. Restrictions on lesser matters (Fifth Amendment “taking” by zoning ordinance, for example) must have a “rational basis”  – the restriction must be rationally related to a legitimate government interest.

So what level of scrutiny must firearms regulations survive?  Eugene Volokh, a law professor writing in the Washington Post, explains the issue.  Personally, I think it ought to be strict scrutiny, same as other fundamental personal rights.  We don’t have a Supreme Court case that says that, yet.  That’s the coming battleground.  If we lose that, we lose the war.

Joe Doakes

There’s always one more, bigger battle.

I’m going to commit to you this longish piece by Jason Harrington, “Dear America: I Saw You Naked“, from Politico.  It chronicles his time as a grad student marooned as a TSA screener at O’Hare. 

Of course, if you’re reading this blog, it’s likely as not you aren’t a huge TSA fan.  And for all that, there are probably things in Harrington’s piece that’ll still get you mad.

But I am linking to this because it’d seem Mr. Harrington and I must have met. 

Because this person:

Every now and then, a passenger would throw up two middle fingers during his or her scan, as though somehow aware of the transgressions going on.

That’s me. 

Every time I fly.

Bring me the Baha Men and the dogs they helped escape!

Are the Kims just crazy or crazy as a fox?

If there’s any regime on the planet that’s been only a Turkish Angoran cat and a monocle away from being a James Bond villain, it’s been the Kim dynasty of North Korea.  From the regime’s nuclear weapons program, to attacking the South Korean navy, shelling a South Korean island, and even declaring a “state of war” with their southern neighbors last March, North Korea has created a reputation as a teetering, despotic dynasty constantly on the verge of either collapse or thermonuclear genocide.  Or perhaps both.

Such an image has been cultivated, in large part, by the cult of personalty surrounding the Kims – and nourished by the reputation of them engaging in downright theatrically outlandish acts of evil.  So it is any wonder that news reports have surfaced that Kim Jong Un didn’t merely executed his purged uncle Jang Song Thaek, the number 2 North Korean official, but fed him alive to 120 dogs? (skip ahead if you’re squeamish):

“Then 120 hounds, starved for three days, were allowed to prey on them until they were completely eaten up. This is called ‘quan jue’, or execution by dogs,” according to the Straits Times of Singapore. The daily relied on a description of the execution in a Hong Kong newspaper that serves as the official mouthpiece of China’s government.

“The entire process lasted for an hour, with Mr. Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader in North Korea, supervising it along with 300 senior officials,” the Straits Times said in a piece published Dec. 24, 2013, but only now getting traction in the United States.

There’s no report yet if when Jang Song Thaek asked Dear Leader if he expected him to talk, Kim Jong Un replied “no, Mr. Thaek, I expect you to die.”

All terrible Bond jokes aside, if the accusations sounds far fetched, it’s because they likely are:

The source is questionable, too. If the Chinese knew about how Kim’s uncle died, why didn’t they talk about it sooner and why did the story only leak out through a Hong Kong news outlet? The incident was first reported by the Wen Wei Po newspaper on December 12, yet it’s only now that The Straits Times has commented upon it – and only now that the Western media has started to take notice. The Straits Times is a respectable and widely read publication, but it’s often been accused of being the mouthpiece of Singapore’s ruling party and is staunchly anti-communist – so political bias is possible. Finally, we can’t dismiss the possibility that China itself has fabricated or at least encouraged the story to send a message to Pyongyang. Kim’s uncle was the architect of closer economic ties between the China and North Korea and there is thought to be a lot of anger about his death.

The story exists because it serves the purposes of all parties involved.  Kim Jong Un needs to maintain the aura of “crazy” that his grandfather and father created, for both foreign and domestic opponents.  Kim was reportedly the target of an assassination attempt last March by rival factions, perhaps being the impetus for Kim’s declaration of “war” later that month as an effort to put the country on a heightened security footing without exposing the weakness of his grip on power.

China loves the story because it gives them a further excuse to distant themselves from the hermit state after having lost their greatest internal political champion in Jang Song Thaek.  The South Koreans love the story because Pres. Park Geun-hye has taken a much harder line against the North, abandoning the “Sunshine Policy” of the 2000s in favor of a more Reaganesquse “trust but verify” approach (billed as “trustpolitik“ by some foreign policy pundits).

The “Kims-as-crazy” story angle ensures no sizable shift in policy on the Korean peninsula, even though there has been a massive shift away from the reconciliation that the Sunshine Policy (1998-2008/9) attempted.  In an effort to extort South Korea and drive a wedge between them and the U.S., the Kims’ reckless behavior accomplished the exact opposite.

So perhaps the Kims are simply crazy after all.

Remember the spring of 2009?  Obama and his hope’nchange had just been inaugurated – so everyone was still blaming Bush for everything. 

And at the Humphrey Center, a conclave of journalist fanboys attended a shinding with Village Voice journo Seymour Hersh, hosted by Walter Mondale at the Humphrey Center, to pimp Hersh’s upcoming book claiming that Bush and Cheney used Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) as their personal hit squad (while not noting that JSOC was a creation of the Carter Administration in which Mondale served as vice president). 

I’m thinking his next shinding in the Twin Cities might be a little sparser in attendance; Hersh is now claiming that Obama used JSOC to falsify the narrative of the Bin Laden raid. 

And Hersh isn’t that impressed by his fanboys in the media, either:

The book will also discuss Hersh’s view that the U.S. media hasn’t committed enough resources to investigative journalism.

Hersh tells The Guardian that the ‘pathetic’ U.S. media ‘is afraid to pick on this guy (President Obama).’

“It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious,” Hersh said of the American media. “They are afraid to pick on this guy (Obama).”

“It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight,” he said.

“Now that doesn’t happen anymore. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president.”

Now, we need to be clear about a few things up front; Sy Hersh is as a rule no more based in reality than Minnesota Progressive Project. 

And yet liberal media types revere him, along with Bob Woodward, as the acme of the craft.

 I’m guessing that’ll change, and the US media will start devoting resources to investigating…

..Seymour Hersh

Just a hunch.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Complaints about how the Obamacare Outreach contracts were awarded.

The complainers’ logic escapes me: only Blacks can reach out to to other Blacks to give them free stuff, they won’t accept it from Whites? Or do you fear White Minnesota Democrats are 1963 racists who will intentionally exclude Blacks from the free stuff, Jim-Crow style? Is this about race at all, or is it about who gets the taxpayer-funded make-work job?

———-

Obama says bombing Syria will prevent Assad from using chemical weapons again, which will deter everybody else from acquiring and using them, which makes our own children safer in the long run.

Condensed version: bomb Syria, for the children.

———-

New “study” proves federally funded early childhood education programs will save Minnesota 4.8 billion in prison costs.

Look for details on this – Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom is involved so we know it’s anti-gun.

———-

A guy with a sawed-off shotgun arrested in Burnsville.

You see, this is why we need universal background checks, to prevent guys like this from carrying sawed-off shotguns into banks and convenience stores. Because although he’s already a career criminal who ignored half-a-dozen laws to commit this crime, he’ll surely obey the next law. Or the one after that. Or the one . . . .

———-

Windmills kill eagles.

So is that too many dead eagles, or not enough? How many dead eagles is too many dead eagles, if the goal is to achieve energy independence? You want green energy or not?

———-

Car bomb explodes on 9/11 outside building formerly used as US Consulate in Benghazi.

 

It’s empty (except for FBI investigators still trying to figure out what happened there a year ago when a bunch of film critics chased us away) so no important American officials killed this time. But bombs are used to send a message (see: Johnson in Vietnam, Obama in Syria). The message Al Qaeda sent with this bomb: “And don’t come back!”

Joe Doakes

“Hit the road, Barack”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

One of the early, successful examples, of drawing a line in the sand, from before President Obama got into the act.

The Light Bringer can’t pull this off because his words carry no authority.  When the Roman Consul threatened you, it wasn’t with a strike “just muscular enough to not get mocked” or one that would be “unbelievably small.”  When Barak Obama threatens you, it’s an international joke.

Joe Doakes

You don’t risk American lives and spend American money to “send a message”.

Say what you will about both of Dubya’s wars – Afghanistan went bad, and the unintended consequences in Iraq were worse than the war itself for all concerned, we get that – but when Dubya went to war, he didn’t “send a message” to the Taliban, or “punish” Hussein. He went to war to unconditionally defeat them.

Not to send a message.

“Messages” are why we have a State Department.  “Punishment” is why we have trade sanctions, Stuxnet and spooks .

(SCENE: MITCH is driving down Thomas Avenue in Saint Paul, heading for the glamorous part of the street, when his phone rings.  He looks; the Caller ID on the screen says “Avery LIBRELLE”).

MITCH:  (Sotto voce) Criminy.  Not Avery again.

(MITCH picks up the phone):  Hello?

LIBRELLE: Mitch?  I need you to come down to the courthouse and bail me out of jail.

MITCH:   Jail? Huh?  What happened?

LIBRELLE:  Well, Mitch, I shot a gun.  At a person.

MITCH:  Huh?  You hate guns.  You are a gun-control activist.  You don’t even own a gun…

LIBRELLE:  I know.  It was one of yours.

MITCH:  Back up.  What?

LIBRELLE:  It was your gun.

MITCH:  (Visiblly confused, pulling his car over to the curb in front of the “Prada On Thomas” boutique)  OK, this is getting weird.  How did you get a gun from me?

LIBRELLE:  I was at your house.

MITCH:  WHAT?

LIBRELLE:  I needed some coconut oil, so I used that key that you used to leave hidden outside for your kids.

MITCH:  What the…that disappeared years ago.

LIBRELLE:  Yeah, but you weren’t using it.

MITCH:  Well, not right at that moment, because I was at work.

LIBRELLE:  Well, it was for A Better Minnesota.  Anyway – we’re getting side-tracked here.   I was digging through your pantry when I saw a couple of people cutting through your neighbor’s yard.  I hate it when people do that, so I figured I’d send them a message.

MITCH:  (Pulled over to the side of the road)  You WHAT?

LIBRELLE:  I opened your gun safe and took out that little cowboy gun.  I figured I’d send a message.

MITCH:  Oh, for the love of…my .22 revolver?

LIBRELLE:  Whatever.  I figure that sending a message would punish them.  So I went out on your back stoop and yelled “NEVER WALK THROUGH PEOPLES’ YARDS AGAIN!”, and pointed the gun sort of at them, but not very close, and squeezed the trigger.

MITCH:  I…I…I can’t believe this…

LIBRELLE:   Either could I.  The “Kick”, I think you call it, almost broke my hand.

MITCH:  So to warn off someone walking through a back yard…

LIBRELLE:  Yep

MITCH:  …that was not mine…

LIBRELLE:  Yep.

MITCH:  …you broke into my house, took my gun, and shot at them?

LIBRELLE:  Yes.  But in my defense, it did look like an unbelievably small gun.

MITCH:  Criminy, Avery.  Lethal force is one of those things that you only use when the danger to you is immediate and and lethal.  And you never point a gun at someone or something you don’t intend to destroy. 

LIBRELLE:  But they crossed a red line!

MITCH:  What red line?

LIBRELLE:  The one I was thinking as I watched them cross into your neighbor’s property.

MITCH:  Using lethal force is something you can only do if your life is in immediate threat of death or great bodily harm!  Not to “send a message”.  And if the force you use is “unbelieveably small”, then – any County Attorney will tell you – the threat to you must not have been all that big in the first place.  There are other ways to deal with threats aren’t immediately lethal to you. 

LIBRELLE:   Bla bla bla.  Are you going to bail me out for A Better Minnesota or what?  Because we need to talk about the public health threat your guns pose to us neighbors.

(And SCENE)

How is it that the Administration is absolutely double-dog certain that Assad launched chemical weapons – in an area with no US presence, much less sovereign control – but after one full year still claims not to know what happened in Benghazi?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Everybody who works for President Obama must echo the party line, from the Vice-President down to the UN Ambassador.  They have no choice.

But here are some of the people outside the Administration, who think it’s a good idea for America to go-it-alone and start a war against Syria:

John McCain

Betty McCollum

Hillary Clinton

This list of names alone convinces me it’s a stupid idea.

Joe Doakes

Note to Joe; you left out Ellison.

More red lines that we have not the faintest will to stand behind.  Again.

Note to Foggy Bottom:  extremists don’t give mulligans.

If, as Keith Ellison and Betty McCollum wish, the Obama Administration drags us to war in Syria, the big victims will likely be the nation’s Alawites (Assad is an ethnic Alawite) and the nation’s beleaguered Christian minority.

Why do Betty “Blood and Guts” McCollum and Keith Ellison hate Christians and Alawites?

…that if we voted for Mitt Romney, the government would push for war with Syria.

And they were right!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I know we’re only half-way through, but can we take a moment to consider Barak Obama’s legacy as President?  How’s he shaping up against his competition?

Reagan and Bush I ended the Cold War.

Nixon opened China.

Johnson – civil rights.  Like it or hate it, he made it happen.

Kennedy – I credit the inspirational ‘put a man on the moon speech’. That was a pivotal moment.

Truman won The War by dropping The Bomb.  World changing event.

Slick Willie, Carter, Eisenhower – nothing much happened, good or bad, they’re as forgettable as Hayes or Cleveland.

The Light Bringer?  So far, the subjects for his legacy include:

the worst economy since the Great Depression

the worst race relations in 50 years
global terrorists rebounding bigger, stronger and more confident than ever
alienating our allies and destroyed all hope of working relations with our associates (China, Russia for example).
destroyed the concept of rule of law with scandals such as IRS, Fast and Furious, GM bailout
executed American citizens without trial, hearing or oversight
increased surveillance of American citizens to levels the KGB only dreamed of
has drones over everyone
has people reading this email
This is Barak Obama’s legacy – The hope and change – so far.  It’s bad enough.  And we have three years left.

Maybe if we invade Syria, things will get better?

Joe Doakes

 Last night, I caught a bit of Hugh Hewitt.  His line is that we need to start convincing Congress to support some sort of action in Syria.  Not so much to “support the President”, but to support some sort of decisive action against Syria. 

Hugh’s a smart guy, and a great friend of mine and of the NARN broadcast.

But he’s wrong on this one.  So are all the Republicans who are getting rolled into supporting this idea – Boehner, Cantor, McCain. 

Hugh’s point is that we can’t stand by and watch children getting murdered, especially the ghastly murders we saw on YouTube last month.   There’s scarcely a person among us, especially parents, who didn’t see that video and want to load up the B52s and go all Jack Bauer on the perps.

Whoever they were.

The Motives: We’re assured it was Assad – by the same intelligence services that have been covering the President’s butt for the last year in re Benghai, and that have a worse record than the Macalester football team.  Others aren’t so sure it was Assad. 

I’m sure not.  Think about it.  Assad was slowly but surely winning his war against the rebels; by most accounts, the rebels’ tide peaked last year, and has been ebbing.  Armed by his Russian and Iranian benefactors, supported by the same parts of Syrian society that support the Mullahs’ in Iran – the not-so-photogenic rural crowd that doesn’t speak English as a second language and doesn’t make it onto NPR stories about life in Syria – Assad was slowly winning the war, block by bloody block.  It wasn’t pretty – but “bloody and ugly” can serve a dictator just as well as fast and surgical. 

There’s plenty of evidence that chemical weapons have been used many times in the Syrian Civil War, by both sides, in small, “surgical” attacks, away from the public eye. 

So with the war swinging his direction, what was, exactly, Assad’s motivation to launch a large, carpet-bombing raid with Sarin in Ain Tarma, Zamalka and Jobar – densely-populated rebel-controlled suburbs of Damascus?

Where all of the world’s media are,  ensuring the attack would receive (by police-state standards) saturation coverage?

Eggs For the Omelet:  Now, the Assad family has all kinds of blood on  its hands.  There’ve been countless massacres under the Assad family’s control of Syria.  One might surmise that all of them have been done at such a time and place and magnitude as to avoid drawing untoward Western scrutiny, since until the civil war started you probably had little to no idea of Syria’s human rights record.  Right?

And then, suddenly, 1,400 dead people, 400 of them children, killed right where all the cameras area. 

Assad isn’t above doing it – but what would be the point of bringing down the opprobium of the entire world just as the war is starting to swing his way?

But the extreme elements of the “rebels?”   Killing their own people has been a treasured part of the extremist playbook for centuries.  The French, Russian and Chinese revolutions are clogged with tales of extremists killing their own people, or allowing them to be killed, for propaganda purposes.  It serves several purposes; it’s grade A grist for the propaganda mill, and if you do it right,  you get rid of some of the “allies” that you’ll need to dispense with to solidify your own faction’s control (see Marat, the Mensheviks, Ernst Röhm).  All of them – especially the children – are eggs that regrettably must be broken to make the omelet. 

I think the case against the “rebels” makes a lot more sense than the one against Assad. 

Politics:Leaving aside the actual incident?  Obama is playing the GOP for fools.  And they’re obliging.

If it succeeds, of course, Obama – aided by his compliant Praetorian Guard in the media – will engineer a Caesarian triumph.  The NYTimes will proclaim that it’s Obama’s victory.    That’d happen whether he gets Congressional approval or, for that matter, if he’d disregarded Congress and charged in with guns blazing. 

By seeking Congressional approval – and going through the charade of being seen to “want” GOP buy-in – Obama is setting up the GOP up to take the blame when the action turns into a fiasco.  As it pretty likelly will – more below.   

This, as Obamacare spirals into full debacle mode, as the IRS and Benghazi and NSA and Fast and Furious scandals are begging for attention, and as the economic “recovery” starts to look more and more like a high-functioning coma. 

The Fiasco Within:  George Patton summed up the goal of war pretty well.  You kill the enemy as fast and as violently and as constantly as you can, so that the war ends as soon as possible, with victory.   You know your objective, and you kill whatever it takes to achieve it, because it’s in acheiving the objective that the war ends with as many of your people as possible alive.

And I picture Patton – or really any soldier worthy of the uniform – looking at Obama’s puling, PR-focus-grouped “plan”, replete with “sending messages” and “degrading capabilities” and “punishing the regime”, and puking his guts out with revulsion. 

You do not risk American lives to “send messages”.

You do not parlay American blood and treasure to rap a gangster thug across the knuckles and mess with his networks. 

You do either, or both, to win the war, provided that the war was worth fighting in the first place; that American security and interests were genuinely, tangibly threatened, in a war that makes and keeps this country safer. 

So why are we flirting with an action that could open a huge regional war – and blow up what’s left of our economy to boot?  What’s the objective that’s worth so much American blood and treasure?

Even our military has a hard time explaining.  And that’s a huge problem.

On the other hand, some of our greatest, most rational minds on the subject of military action – Victor Davis Hanson among ’em – can spell out the case against intervention in so many ways you’re tempted to say “enough with the overkill”. 

Wag The Boehner: This action is the tail wagging the dog.  I strongly suspect that it’s an epic deception – and whether it is or isn’t, it’s being manipulated by the Administration for political purposes, to give a war-weary public something else to hold against Republicans in 2014, just in time to give Obama control of the House. 

And John Boehner and Eric Cantor are aiding and abetting it. 

Are they doing it for all the right reasons – to avenge the dead children.  Who doesn’t want to keep the children safe?  Everyone!

Sure.  And so they’ll go down in history – having been brutally manipulated into a colossal mistake, for all the right reasons.

Brits have been fighing, and dying, alongside Americans in the Middle East for over 20 years now. 

But if you stand up Obama?  Time to bring in the bouncers:

British military chiefs are being ejected from US meetings about Syria in the first direct consequence of David Cameron’s refusal to join military action.

The role of senior British officers based at US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, has been downgraded because they cannot be trusted with high-level intelligence about a conflict with which they are no longer involved, military sources say.

Say what you will about the idea of the war itself. 

But this is further evidence that Obama isn’t just the worst president of my lifetime, but perhaps the dumbest.

The Nobel Peace-Prize-winning Obama Administration has been beating the war drums like John Bonham has risen from the dead and wants to get through the gig so he can trash the hotel already

And still we’ve seen no sign of Madea Benjamin.

Or Cindy “Absolute Moral Authority” Sheehan.

Or Code Pink.

Their relatives are starting to get nervous.

If you have any information as to their whereabouts, please call 1-976-PEACECREEPS.

Thanks.

The democratic and legislative process of our allies – sovereign nations all…:

So when Prime Minister David Cameron was unable to muster the votes in Parliament for support for a strike in Syria — even one limited to stopping the future use of chemical weapons — shock could be heard in the voices of senior White House officials who never saw the British rejection coming.

“Bungled by Cameron,” said one.

“Embarrassing,” said another. “For Cameron, and for us.”

Now Mr. Obama is left to cope with miscalculations on both sides of the Atlantic.

…are there for the mocking by our current pack of ruling fratboys.

Just Remember:

Given that this actually is Obama’s supporters best line (literally – “Bush did it first, so don’t be teh hypocret” is the gyst of not a few lefties’ responses to criticsm), it’s hard to even call it “satire”. 

Call it “Journalism”.