Atrocities
abound, human and political devastation is sure to ensue, as the President of
the United States is rendered powerless to exercise the reason those who elected
him expected to see in the White House.
His
top second-term advisers—-John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and Jacob Lew—-are reduced to
following scripts being imposed on them by irrationality outside the White
House.
“A
political agreement is still the best solution to this deadly conflict,” a New York Times editorial says of Syria, “and
every effort must be made to find one. President Obama has resisted demands
that he intervene militarily and in force. Though Mr. Assad’s use of chemical
weapons surely requires a response of some kind, the arguments against deep
American involvement remain as compelling as ever.”
On
the debt ceiling, the Treasury Secretary is whistling in the dark that
Republicans in Congress don’t want “a repeat of 2011. I don’t yet see that they
have a plan to avoid it, which is one of the reasons it’s so important for them
to come back in just a couple of weeks and get to work on getting this done and
trying to make the debt issue different from other debates that we have.”
In these
fantasies of negotiating with the likes of Assad and Boehner, Obama will likely
be playing tennis with nobody on the other side of the net. What would any of
us do in his place?
One
small step would be to let him and our representatives in Congress know that
not everyone in the country is in step with a mindless media that keeps
reporting on both issues like ball games rather than life-and-death matters.
Voices
like that of Connecticut’s Sen. Chris Murphy urging restraint on a response to
Syria should be amplified by Americans everywhere to slow down this latest
march to madness. The alternative is to keep fighting, and losing, wars nobody wants.
2 comments:
Would we attack China or Russia if they did what the Syrian government is alleged to have done? I think not. Why might we do so in Syria? Because we can; we're bigger than they are. That is being a bully.
Unfortunately, the elites and neocons want this war with a passion and they generally tend to get whatever they want. They and their friends will make out like the bandits they are and the rest of us can go pound sand as far as they are concerned.
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