Gag the God

It seems that just about everybody, liberal and conservative alike, is disappointed by Trump's failure to start World War III. Well, at least he brought them together. You know there's a problem when Roy Edroso has to tie himself in knots like this. One of his commenters did better:

I’m having a helluva hard time trying to explain to my non-American wife why the U.S. cares enough about Syria to take sides.
ME: Well, it is a genuinely awful, murderous regime.
HER: [stares at me silently for several seconds].
ME: OK, seriously, though, it’s mostly because Assad is supported by Russia and Iran.
HER: And Trump will do anything to spoil PUTIN’s day??
ME: Well, forget Russia, it really comes down to Iran. We don’t want Iran to come out of this with a win.
HER: What exactly do they win, then, if the Syrian regime survives?
ME: Ummm, mostly they get to give the Saudis the finger.
HER: [stares at me silently for several seconds].
ME: Look, that’s how I understand it. It has all these balance-of-power, proxy war ramifications.
HER: So is it something like... if Russia and Iran get credited with the “win,” then the U.S. loses international ranking points? Like when Federer went out early in Miami?
ME: Exactly.

Anybody who can explain it better, please chip in. Thankfully, she didn’t marry me for my geopolitical savvy.

Meanwhile, the US and our dear clients continue to kill civilians in Yemen and elsewhere, showing our government's regard for the sacredness of human life.

Bite Me, I'm a Liberal

Last fall I noticed numerous liberal Democrats posting about the plight of children in Syria; which was fair enough. They cried, "Why don't we do something?", which wasn't. When I asked them what they thought "we" could do about it, some had no idea, others wanted the US to intervene militarily; which would kill and injure many more Syrian children, but that didn't bother them because we've got to do something.  (Some people actually said that.)  Only America, God's anointed nation, can kill the little children, because we do it in a spirit of love!

Next I asked them about the dying children of Yemen, a catastrophe directly aided by the US; the US could do something by cutting off military aid to the Saudi "coalition," and by putting other kinds of pressure on our client. (Syria is not our client.) Of course thinking about this would mean acknowledging then-President Obama's share of responsibility for the horror, so I wasn't surprised that none of them ever took up the cause of Yemen, even to post memes about it.  As far as I recall, almost none of them even replied to my comments.

Yet even now, when Trump's the official Satan and it's safe to attack his policies and actions, Democratic liberals are stiill silent about Yemen. (They've also fallen silent about the poor children of Syria, which I think sheds some light on how much they ever really cared about them.) If you want to know why many people don't trust, let alone esteem liberals as they esteem themselves, this is one reason why.

(The title of this post refers to a Facebook group called "Don't Like Liberals? Bite Me."  No, thanks.)

The United States of Amnesia, Latest Installment

A couple of weeks ago, numerous liberal friends on Facebook were posting pictures of children who'd been injured in the Syrian Civil War, which they'd apparently gotten from corporate media, thus showing their bold opposition to the Assad regime and to all bad governments that hurt children. Much handwringing -- "if only we could do something," etc. Not one of them posted pictures of Yemeni children who'd been hurt in the Saudi "coalition" invasion of Yemen, which is supported materially by the US and UK governments. Not one. Well, no wonder -- they hadn't been given permission to be upset about Yemeni children ("unworthy victims," as Noam Chomsky calls them), and our courageous adversary media hadn't supplied them with piteous pictures to share. And now even the concern about Syrian children seems to have dried up.

It's All Fun Until Somebody Loses an Eye: From the "No One Could Have Foreseen This" Casebook

It looks like the US had another one of those "Oops!" moments in Syria recently.

The Pentagon warned the Syrian government Friday not to strike U.S. and coalition personnel in Syria, a day after the regime carried out airstrikes in an area near American special operations forces, prompting the U.S. to scramble jets to protect them.

Daniel Larison, who wrote about this incident, pointed out that the longer US troops remain in Syria, no matter how "non-combat" their role supposedly is, the more likely it is that the protection will fail and an incident will turn into an excuse to invade.

When the U.S. backs proxies in a foreign civil war and puts U.S. forces on the ground with them, it opens the door to new and unexpected conflict with other armed groups in the country. By extending protection to U.S. proxies in Syria, the U.S. could find itself drawn into yet another conflict in Syria. Anti-regime groups would have a strong incentive to put the U.S. in that position. The more U.S. forces that are sent into the country, the greater the chances of an incident that could lead to a wider war, and Clinton is on record in favor of sending more special forces into Syria. This episode underscores the absurdity of the administration’s many statements that U.S. forces aren’t in combat in Syria, and it reminds us how quickly a supposedly “limited” intervention could spiral into something much worse.

I wonder again: what are US forces doing in Syria -- a country which is neither our client nor our ally, with whose government we aren't even nominally friendly, but with which we are not, supposedly, at war either?  Suppose that some foreign government, Russia for example, were to station its troops in the United States in order to extend protection to its proxies here.  Suppose some other country were to decide that white supremacists, say, were its proxies in the United States.  Suppose Mexico decided to station some of its troops in the US to protect its citizens here -- in a purely advisory, non-combat role, of course.  Would most Americans, regardless of their party affiliation, consider such intervention and presence a sign of that other country's disinterested commitment to peace?

It's tempting to speculate that US troops are in Syria as bait, with the conscious intention that some of them will be hurt or killed by the bad guys so that the US can invade and kill lots of civilians, including children.  (The recent viral photo of a little boy, a drowned refugee, outraged so many Americans -- nobody gets to hurt or kill Syrian kids but us!  When that picture turned up on my Facebook feed last week with much lamenting about the sadness of this world and the badness of people, but what can you do, I pointed out the US' support for Saudi Arabian killing of civilians in Yemen, which Americans could do something about by pressuring our government to stop its participation in the atrocities.  The reaction (or rather, non-reaction) was predictable.  It's so much more satisfying, as Noam Chomsky has been pointing out for decades, to weep about the crimes of our official enemies than to notice the crimes of our friends.)  If Hillary Clinton wins this election, it's a good bet that US intervention will escalate; but very possibly Trump will do the same if he's elected.

Still, going by the US' record, our leaders aren't thinking that far ahead; they are, on the evidence, too stupid to do that.  It never occurs to them that if they put American troops in hostile territory, someone will shoot at them.  I recently saw an item about US troops in Ukraine a couple of years ago, where some of the locals threw stones at them.  Again: what were US troops doing in Ukraine?  One can't expect grunts to have a realistic idea of what they're getting into, I know, but the Wise Leaders who sent them there should have known better.  It wasn't the Existential Danger Donald Trump who made these blunders, it was a Democratic administration -- but Republican politicians and pundits have been agitating for a US invasion of Syria for years too.  But no one could possibly have foreseen that anything would go wrong.  We are America, after all, and nothing ever goes wrong on our watch.

No-Thought Zone Enforced in US Political Discourse

Daniel Larison has written several strong pieces condemning those politicians who prattle about enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria.  (Don't forget that Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of them.)  In one of his earlier pieces he'd said that he wasn't sure they really knew what they were calling for (which is probably true), and "Many of them would probably be horrified by the suggestion that they are endorsing a policy that could require shooting down Russian jets over Syria, and yet that is exactly what they are doing."  I commented that, unfortunately, "many of those who favor a no-fly zone are delighted by the idea of shooting down Russian planes."  And within a few days, several of them obligingly confirmed my understanding.  Just to make sure we know where he stands, Jeb Bush repeated himself:

“The argument is, ‘Well, we’ll get into conflict with Russia,’” former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida said on CBS last week, referring to what critics say about the no-fly zone idea. “Well, maybe Russia shouldn’t want to be in conflict with us. I mean, this is a place where American leadership is desperately needed.”

Larison expressed the hope that candidates who expressed these dangerous views would be rejected by the voters.  One of his commenters countered:

Don’t count on it. If you aren’t belligerent you are weak. America’s bout of pacifism before the two world wars is long gone, and advocating caution and patience is blasted for failing to lead. I think you are spot on with respect to your views on Syria, but there are precious few people in power who espouse it.

I really don’t think so, but first of all this person is misusing the word “pacifism.” It’s a word that gets thrown around in contexts where “pussy” and “faggot” wouldn’t be appropriate, and it means anyone who opposes, for any reason, a war that the speaker wants to fight — or rather, wants to send other people’s sons and daughters to fight. Quite a few military men opposed Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and I don’t think any of them were pacifists, but they were vilified by the chickenhawks anyway.

So, let’s lay to rest the idea that Americans had a pacifist period between the World Wars. As Larison has said several times, and so have I, it is not pacifism or (another favorite epithet) isolationism to lack enthusiasm for a war where your country’s interests are not at stake. Contrary to the chickenhawks’ claims, the burden of argument lies on the proponents of any war, not the opponents. And it took pretty hefty propaganda campaigns to fossick Americans up into support for both World Wars.

Were Americans un-pacifist after World War II? There’s reason to doubt that idea. Almost immediately after the Japanese surrender in 1945, US rulers wanted to get us involved in Southeast Asia, and there was a public outcry, in Congress and elsewhere, against using US forces and equipment to support the re-imposition of French rule on Vietnam.  The War in Korea wasn’t popular either, and the ruling elites knew it. During that period, into the 1950s, there was also a tendency in popular culture to look askance at men of veterans’ age who had had enough of bloodshed and just wanted to live quietly with their families for a while — see the lousy movie Shane which glorifies the professional killer at the expense of the solid father and family man, and centers on the loathsome little boy who wants to see a gunfight.

And surely we've all heard of the Vietnam Syndrome, much lamented in the corporate media and in elite government planning circles, which meant they had to find ways to get around the public’s disinclination to send their children off to be chewed up in the military meat grinder. Most Americans, like most people, aren’t really very interested in war, but there are always a few who never heard of a war they didn’t like, as long as someone else had to fight it -- and such people end up in decision-making positions far too often. Again, the burden of argument lies on someone who wants us to get into a shooting war with Russia in Syria, and as Larison keeps showing, they have no good arguments, and are frustrated that anyone should demand any.

There They Go Again!

Speaking of the cult of personality, I've noticed that some people have been trying to give President Obama all the credit for de-escalating of superpower hostilities in Syria.  He went to Congress with the question of whether to bomb Syria!  He proved that diplomacy is better than war!

Never mind that Obama only went to Congress after a popular and Congressional uproar over his bellicosity -- and then he couldn't get the support he wanted for an attack, so he let it be known that if he wanted to, he'd kill Syrians without Congressional approval.  The national conversation on Syria erupted without his initiative and, indeed, against his wishes.  Luckily, Vladimir Putin saved him by getting Assad's regime to agree to get rid of their chemical weapons.  (Assad will still have plenty of other weapons to kill Syrians with, of course.)

As far as I've seen, the Obama administration itself hasn't been rewriting the recent history of his policy on Syria; it's been free-lance PR people among his devotees.  (See the comments under this article, this comment for example:

Obama has very strong political skills. Diplomacy is always better means to resolve a problem than war. No shots have been fired and there is a binding resolution today by the UN security council to recover and destroy all Syrian chemical weapons...if this is not a strong political and diplomatic skill by the Obama administration, please tell me what you expect.

Maybe this person believes that Obama was playing eleven-dimensional chess again: he never really intended to bomb Syria, he just threatened to do so as a kind of civics lesson to Congress and to American citizens generally -- even to Vladimir Putin.  Congress would never have asserted its Constitutional war powers if Obama hadn't pretended to defy them!  Americans would never have questioned the use of war over diplomacy if Obama hadn't pretended to want to attack Syria!  Putin wouldn't have cooperated with Obama to get rid of Syria's chemical weapons if POTUS hadn't fooled him!  (Seriously: another commenter wrote that Obama "just snookered Vladimir Putin and Bashar al Assad to work out an agreement under the auspices of the UN to turn over their chemical weapons, without a single military dollar being spent."  [P.S.: "their chemical weapons"?])

The discipline of their memories is ... impressive.  They don't even need Obama's instructions to know when and how to magnify his name.  Now, that is faith that the Son of Man would envy.

This episode reminded me of something that happened thirty years ago, during the administration of Obama's hero Ronald Reagan.  I've quoted it before, from Mark Green and Gail MacColl's There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error (Pantheon, 1983), page 89: 

During the 1982 election campaigns, the Republican TV advertisement showed a white-haired mailman delivering July's Social Security Check, which contained an automatic cost-of-living increase in benefits.  "President Reagan kept his promise to the American people," the ad proclaimed.
In fact, Reagan opposed the increase in Congress, which passed it anyway.  Rep. Claude Pepper (D-Fla.) chairman of the House Committee on Aging, said that for Reagan to claim credit for the increase "lowers the art of deception to depths not explored since the Nixon Administration" (New York Times, 7/7/82) [p. 89].

But again, this Orwellian rewriting of history came from the Republican campaign machine.  Obama's fans outdo Reagan: they spontaneously and independently manufacture falsehoods to glorify their Leader.

Syrial Killing

The poster above was hung in a local store window, along with a lot of other public announcements, most of them promoting music and other entertainment events rather than politics.  Young Americans For Liberty is a relatively new right-wing youth organization, founded in 2008 at the end of Ron Paul's presidential campaign.  They seem to be a bit better at imagery than most right-wing groups, but they're still unimpressive, and they're evidently unaware of people who opposed Bush's and Obama's wars without being Paulite Libertarians.  If I meet any of these people, I should ask them what they think about Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald.  Or Michael Moore, ambivalent about Obama as he is.  ("Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief!" could be Moore's slogan.)  And I admit I'm out of touch with The Kids these days, but I can't help suspecting that people who look like the people in that poster are more likely to oppose Obama's war plans than to support them.

The controversy over whether the US should lob some missiles into Syria goes on.  So far my Right-Wing Acquaintance opposes it, but only because Obama's a Democrat.  RWA1 has also been indignant about NSA data collection, which I don't believe he ever criticized as long as a Republican was in the White House.  (RWA1 called the agency "the No Such Agency", hur hur hur.)  He linked to a rather vacuous post at The Skeptical Libertarian Blog and commented "Imperial assertions should be treated skeptically."  I take that with a grain of salt, because I've heard RWA1 declare his distaste for the word "imperialism" when it was directed at the foreign-policy endeavors of Republican administrations; like "civility" and other desiderata, everything is a matter of party loyalty.  I wouldn't be surprised if RWA1 might have expressed some misgivings about Bush's surveillance programs and even Bush's wars in private -- but party discipline kept it private.  It's the same with Democrats criticizing Obama: oh, you know, he's not perfect, in fact I might go so far as to say that he's a bit of a disappointment, but he's not Bush and it's very important that we support him or the Republicans will take over.  This kind of talk is also a way of assuring oneself that one hasn't completely abandoned principle for the Party.

The other day someone commented on a post by Ta-Nehisi Coates about the "idiot public discourse" on Syria.  Well, of course, there are a lot of people out there discoursing, and the media are vast, so it's not surprising that there is some idiotic discourse going on about Syria, as there is on any topic.  But what strikes me is how much thoughtful, sensible discourse is available, in relatively mainstream media as well as in the more rarefied blogosphere.  (One excellent place to start after Coates and his colleague James Fallows would be Daniel Larison's series of short blog posts on Syria at The American Conservative.)  The truly idiotic discourse is coming, not from the caricatured Cheetos-gobbling, Jolt-guzzling chairborne brigades embunkered in their parents' basements, but from the Obama administration and its corporate media shills -- that is, the supposedly sober, credentialed, responsible voices of our society.  Obama and his new Secretary of State have made utter fools of themselves with transparent lies, which only seem to deceive their peers and whatever remains of the die-hard Obama loyalists.  (The NSA revelations probably paved the way for this newfound skepticism among Obama's fans.)

I've noticed, though, that some of the die-hard fans are clinging to the faith by trying to convince themselves that Obama doesn't really want to attack Syria, and that he decided to let Congress deliberate on the attack in order to give him a face-saving way to back down.  Considering that Obama's aides, including Kerry, made it clear that the President doesn't consider himself bound by Congressional opinion, this is obvious and rather sad wishful thinking, on a par with the oft-expressed conviction that Obama didn't want the Sequester or to cut Social Security, it was all the Rethugs' fault.  Maybe when they aren't struck by lightning for opposing Obama, they'll gather more courage as they go along.

It's frustrating, I admit, to see so many on the Right gleefully recycling their standard anti-Obama propaganda for use against Obama's warmongering; but Obama brought it on himself.  So, for example, one friend of mine passed along a meme with a familiar slogan of late: that Obama is pushing the world into World War III: I pointed out that World War III really began with the Bush junta's response to the September 11 attacks, and that Obama is just continuing that.  This friend is old enough to remember the Bush years, but I think she was too stoned to pay much attention then -- as well as too stoned now.  Obama is responsible for his continuation of Bush policies, but I have no illusions that a Republican president would be any better.

Which reminds me -- also under a Ta-Nehisi Coates post, some commenters discussed impeachment, specifically whether Obama could be impeached if he didn't consult Congress on his war plans.  I have mixed feelings about impeachment: I have no doubt that Obama, like Bush, has committed impeachable offenses.  I have no illusion that if Obama were impeached, it would be for irrelevant offenses (as Bill Clinton was); and the Republicans who'd lead the process would see the removal of Obama from office as a partisan victory, just as the Democrats would see it as a partisan defeat.  One commenter concluded, "The only solution to that sort of crisis is voting in new leadership. And we can't recall the President."  Ah, the old "vote the rascals out" canard!  The question, it seems to me, is whether Presidents can be held accountable for their crimes; one reason why the ones we have are so reliably lawless, regardless of party, is that the worst consequence they face is being voted out of office -- and a second-term president like Obama doesn't even have to worry about that.  That's why the Constitution provides for impeachment.  But would the impeachment of Obama, anymore than the impeachment of Bush before him, really have been a deterrent to Presidential criminality?  I doubt it: Richard Nixon would have been impeached and removed if he hadn't resigned, and his chosen successor Gerald Ford pardoned him so he faced no consequences for his crimes.  He managed to rebrand himself as a senior statesman -- again, because of the amoral complicity of the corporate media and the political establishment -- and his successors of both parties went on merrily trampling on the Constitution right down to the present.

The discussion of what to do about about a boy like Assad tends to get bogged down in side issues, though.  For example, there's debate about whether Assad's regime really is responsible for the gas attack that Obama is using as his excuse to kill Syrians.  There is, evidently, room for doubt on that point, but it's not really important, since even if Assad personally deployed the sarin, the US does not have any authority to punish him for it.  Nor does Obama's "red line" ultimatum give him sanction for an attack: saving the American President's face is not a legal ground for military action, under international law or under the Constitution.  As a correspondent of James Fallows wrote to him, "This is a self-created crisis of Obama's presidency that he has turned into a general foreign policy crisis, not the other way around."  These matters deserve some discussion, I suppose, since Obama and the US government have made claims, and it's valid to question whether our leaders are telling the truth.  (Given their record, there's a strong presumption that they aren't.)  But these are still side issues.  I've been impressed by those writers who've stuck to the core questions.

James Fallows is one of them: he has been much more critical of Obama's plans than I expected from a senior establishment journalist of his stature.  He doesn't enable comments on his blog posts, but he does print select e-mail from his readers, and he asked them to suggest what Obama should do about Syria.  He printed several suggestions, none of which I found very inspiring.  This set was interesting, though, in a disturbing way.

1) Attack Syrian air defenses. Accomplishing this should not create the risk of collateral damage, as they are not hidden in schools and hospitals.  If the Syrian government does not stop their war on their citizens, then:

2) Attack the Syrian air force.  Destroy every piece of aircraft they own.  Get the Russians to not complain too much by telling them they will be able to sell them new equipment.  With no aircraft (especially no attack helicopters), their ability to kill their own civilians is hampered.  The possibility of this happening should be obvious to them once their air defenses are taken out.  If they can't see that, then they deserve to lose their jets and helicopters.  Again, there should be little risk of collateral damage, but I am guessing the civilians would be more worried about being killed by their own government than by Syrian jets falling out of the sky.

3) If they still insist on using chemical weapons or slaughtering their own citizens, flatten their government buildings. Make them run their government from caves or underground bunkers or wherever they flee.  So maybe the country will be plunged into chaos, how is that worse than what they have now?

We should not only intervene in mass slaughter when oil is involved.

I take that last sentence as a reference to Libya.  But these suggestions are as untenable as anything Obama wants to do.  I don't know who wrote this stuff, but many of Fallows's contacts are government and even military people.  I really doubt that attacking Syria's air defenses would be as easy as he thinks, or that "collateral damage" would be as minimal as he thinks.  The worst is the idea of bombing government buildings, which is considered terrorism when anyone but the US does it, a fun opportunity when we do.  These are probably the worst suggestions Fallows chose to print, but I didn't see anything I thought was actually positive and realistic among the rest.  There may be nothing the US can actively do about the Assad regime and its crimes, but we can at least refrain from committing more mass slaughter ourselves.

Bomb Bomb Assad, Plus Thousands of Civilians

An old friend posted a link to a story from the Onion today, which satirically imagined the managing editor of CNN.com explaining why Miley Cyrus's performance at the Video Music Awards was their top story today: it was a cynical move to get more web traffic.  It wasn't one of the Onion's better efforts.  (This one was better.)  Those who clicked through the Cyrus story and related items like the accompanying "Evolution of Miley" slideshow have only themselves to blame.  Still, it is possible to read about Miley Cyrus and the violence in Syria, Egypt, or elsewhere.  At least I think it is; I don't turn to CNN for serious news coverage anyway.  And I still can't be bothered to see what Cyrus did at the VMA the other night.

A mutual friend, someone I've known for almost as long, commented: "It's really a pathetic commentary on American homo sapiens that far more will weigh in on Cyrus than what's happening in Syria."  Someone else wrote "Miley's sexy dance was shown on the 'celeb news' in Germany, too. It was very awkward to watch, but I don't see how it needs to be international news... Then again, we also get more updates on Syria and even on the fire in California than we do 'in case you give a shit what American stars do in their spare time, here are some clips.'"  (I don't think that appearing and performing on a professional awards program counts as "spare time" -- it's part of the job.  But whatever.)

I'm hoping my friends aren't mistaking a piece from the Onion for real news.  I'm sure of the person who posted this link, not so sure about the second person.  She can put her mind at rest, though.  Judging by what people I know post to Facebook, artery-clogging recipes, exhortations to "like" Jesus or children with cancer, inspirational quotations, cat videos and cute Obama pictures far outnumber any weighing-in on Miley Cyrus.

When I travel I sometimes watch a little CNN on the hotel TVs.  Last time (before this month) I was in San Francisco, in September 2012, CNN's evening coverage devoted a couple of hours to Syria.  The gay anchor, what's-his-name Anderson, did a story on the possibility of private citizens legally supplying weapons to the rebels, which he clearly favored.  Right-wing wackette Erin Burnette was also, as I recall, very concerned about Syria.  From what I see in media-watch media like FAIR, the corporate media have maintained a fairly steady drumbeat of Syria coverage.  More recently, Obama has floated the possibility of the US government arming the rebels, and that has hardly escaped notice by the corporate media.  Democracy Now!, not a corporate program but a lefty/liberal one, has reports of Syrian casualties almost daily. The US government has been steadily supplying anonymous government officials to accuse Assad's regime of using chemical weapons, though actual evidence has been sparse, and I'm skeptical of the new claims for just that reason.  So I think it's ridiculous to accuse the US corporate media of ignoring Syria in favor of celebrity antics.  Maybe they haven't covered Syria 24/7, but by that standard, my friend herself would be guilty of not weighing in on Syria enough on Facebook.  For shame!  The Flying Spaghetti Monster will be ashamed of her in the world to come.

So, what would be a preferable alternative?  From the viewpoint of a non-elite US citizen, I don't know.  Should I be writing to the corporate media to urge them to provide more US-friendly propaganda about Syria, or to take an editorial stand in favor of US intervention?  If so, I refuse.  I'm open to suggestions for constructive actions that citizens or the government could take, but I haven't heard any.  Who is gullible enough to believe that Obama cares at all about the plight of the Syrian people?  (I was going to include Vladimir Putin in that question, but Putin doesn't matter here: he's a bad man, but he's not a US politician.)  Who is gullible enough to believe that a US intervention would have a good outcome -- for the Syrians, I mean, not for Obama's approval ratings or for the bank accounts of profiteers?  Plenty of people, to answer my own rhetorical question, and I find that a lot more worrisome than the numbers who are concerned because a twenty-year-old young woman danced suggestively on MTV.  The US is not and never has been interested in the welfare of people in the countries we attack, despite our humanitarian protestations.  Arming the rebels, who as far as I know are not good guys either, would be the first US step but it wouldn't be the last.  Remember when we were just going to impose a "no-fly zone" on Libya?  Obama was able to avoid any US casualties there, which is all that matters because only US military lives are of any value.  The Libyan civilians who died?  Who cares?  Not most American "progressives."

So when John Kerry -- not a person for whom I have any respect -- gets all stern and serious about the evil acts of Assad, I know something bad is going to happen.  Probably not for the US, though.  Anyone who gets behind the Obama gang on this discredits themselves.  If anyone has any serious ideas how to help the Syrian people without supporting a US or UN or (Cthulhu help us) NATO intervention, I'd be interested in hearing them.  But I don't see any point at all in griping because Miley Cyrus got some coverage.  Better that than the latest batch of foreign policy "experts" doing a CNN roundtable on any subject.  Let them talk about Miley instead.