Yes, there's an NSA spying scandal--it's just not the one everyone's talking about

The far Left and the far Right are full of paranoid antigovernment zealots who think Snowden is a hero for revealing the gummint's evil plot to spy on us all. But it wasn't and isn't, as a less paranoid court recently adjudicated (on this case's way to the Supreme Court).

The real scandal is how the National Security Agency let someone--not even an employee, but an outside contractor--steal a boatload of Top Secrets. That reveals a kind of incompetence that's truly scary. Heads should roll when we find out how this happened.

Of course the Republicans don't care whether our security apparatus works well or not--only whether they can lay their hands on a lever that can get them back into the White House.

As for Snowden--he isn't a whistleblower. A whistleblower is a member of an institution who comes to believe that the institution he belongs to does bad things in the dark that conflict with the things it says in public.

Snowden has stated that he sought the position he held in order to steal secrets from the NSA and reveal them. That makes him a spy in doing so--and remember, someone can be a spy for money or for ideology. They're a spy either way.

And then he revealed things about American spying activities that damaged our national interests. Since Snowden is an American citizen, that makes him a traitor. And now he's promising to reveal further secrets about America in exchange for residency and protection in another country.

It is true that whistleblowers are frequently punished severely for their actions. That's unjust and corrupt, but it isn't germane to Snowden.

The question for those inclined to treat Snowden as a hero is whether they're taking into account the damage he did the nation in the course of making his revelations.

What Republicans hear when you say "Obamacare"

The Republican Party didn't rename the ACA "Obamacare" for nothing. The change sounds harmless enough to liberals and moderates--and even moderate, unbiased urban conservatives--because they have no idea how the change plays to the GOP's undereducated, aging, white, male-dominated, fundamentally Southern base.

What they hear when you say "Obamacare" is "Negrocare:"  a law enabling the Negro president of the Negro-loving government to steal money from whites and give it to Negroes by the same federal government that once started the "war of Northern aggression" against the Confederacy.

And yes, many older white Southerners still refer to the Civil War as the "War of Northern aggression." As the patriarch of America's most popular reality show articulated when he said blacks were perfectly happy under Southern white rule.

America's urbanites cannot grasp how much rural older white Americans hate Obama for being black, and hate him even more for being educated and, as presidents go, rather aloof. That makes him an Uppity Negro in their eyes, and that grinds their grits.

Also, "Obamacare" personalizes it. It lets such people reject the ACA because they reject the man, instead of forcing them to confront what they could possibly object to in provisions like not letting insurance companies dump you on any flimsy pretext if you get really sick and thus start to cut into their profits.

Or the fact that any kind of insurance only works if the pool is big enough. That's why every driver is required to have liability insurance. The mandatory requirement is, in fact, a Republican idea formulated by the conservative Heritage Foundation and embodied in "Romneycare."

Republicans only because opposed to this way of preventing freeloaders on the healthcare system when the Democrats agreed with them that it was the right thing to do.

Bottom line: don't call it "Obamacare" even if all the mainstream media does and even the left-leaning media does. They're being played by the GOP's Ministry of Propaganda when they do--and so are you.

The Whopper of the Year wasn't the President's lie about ACA coverage--it's the Republicans lie that their alternative is better

Every hour of every day, across the airwaves and the blogosphere, Republican partisans blast “Obamacare” with the usual heavy-handed sarcasm that passes for humor in conservative circles.
    Oddly, though, no Republican has even one word to say about Republicare–their alternative to the Affordable Care Act.
    Republicare is what we’ll get if the Republicans succeed in destroying the Affordable Care Act, through a combination of winning the Presidency and their lavishly funded national campaign of sabotaging the ACA. Then we’ll revert to the American healthcare system as of 2008, with no changes whatsoever. The proof of this is simple: the Republican-dominated House has passed 46 healthcare bills since 2010. And every one of them did nothing but repeal the ACA. Period. Individual Republican lawmakers suggest this or that reform, but the GOP's "Repeal and Replace" campaign, so far, is all repeal, no replace.
    So the real whopper of the year is the claim that the American healthcare system as of 2008, with no changes at all, beats the ACA, warts and all.
    The Republicans know better than to say this out loud. They’re just hoping Americans won’t realize it’s what they’re actually saying. They’re hoping we won’t remember what it was like to have insurance company clerks making life and death decisions about you–decisions that were nearly impossible to appeal; to have your insurance dropped as soon as you got really sick; to have insurance refused if you had a “pre-existing condition;” to get sold junk insurance policies in which “the large print giveth–the small print taketh away” (apologies to Tom Waits); a healthcare system that was the most expensive on earth per capita, with the worst results among rich countries.
    There are Americans who will spend more for healthcare under the ACA than before. However, what most of this small minority don't realize is that the healthcare insurance they'd had before was, for most, junk policies that would have done nothing for them if something bad actually happened to them. Investigative journalists have researched the angry "ACA losers" featured on FOX News daily and found that most of the cases were bogus--people who hadn't bothered to find out what their alternatives were under the ACA, or who didn't realize that their old policies were so bad they were really uninsured.
    For at least 90% of all Americans, they're better off with the ACA.
    Want proof? Look at what the Republicans say. They refuse to talk about what they have to offer in lieu of "Obamacare." What's the use of criticizing anything if you don't talk about the alternative?

     I dare any Republican to actually compare “Obamacare” to Republicare.

Republicans and Democrats both fail to grasp who is an American

Democrats have the nerve to claim that anyone who lives in America deserves citizenship--even if they got here illegally. I'd say it just means Democrats don't value national sovereignty very much, but those who go ballistic over drone attacks in other sovereign countries seem to value the sovereignty of other nations highly--just not ours.

Republicans have the gall to treat anyone who isn't not just Republican but "Conservative" as well as if they aren't American citizens.This seems to be how they justify their extreme gerrymandering, their laws designed to disenfranchis blacks, students, and other Democratic-leaning groups, the extreme differential in penalties for drugs they use (alcohol, cigarettes) and those "others" use--most notably marijuana, and their constant efforts to criminalize abortion. It also explains their campaign to deny that the first black American president isn't an American citizen.

So from a rational perspective the Left thinks some people who aren't Americans are, and the Right thinks about half of Americans aren't.

That means the Left wants to hand out citizenship to around 11 million Mexican citizens mostly, while the Right wants to deny citizenship to around 150 million American citizens.

Of course the Right doesn't want to actually take away Democrats' citizenship papers--it just wants to prevent a Democratic majority from being a majority in political institutions from the city to the national level, and to impose Christian Shariah law on Democrats. That is, to make them second-class citizens without voting rights.

The Lie of the Year isn't President Obama's whopper about the Affordable Care Act

Politifact.com has "awarded" its Lie of the Year dubious honor to President Obama for saying you keep your healthcare if you like it.

The Right Wing Media has picked this up and made a whole lotta hay with it.

But this time they're wrong.

The President's lie was a lie, all right, and even though it only directly affects a very small percentage of Americans it also affects his credibility with everyone else.

However, the Lie of the Year is vastly more pernicious, even though no one ever says it explicity.

It's the Republicans' lie that Republicare is better than Obamacare for any but 1% of Americans.

Republicare is what we get if the Republicans repeal Obamacare. Forty-six times in that last several years the Republicans have voted to repeal Obamacare in its entirety (in the House of Representatives), and 46 times the Republcans' health bill contained exactly nothing to replace Obamacare with if it succeeded.

So Republicare is simply America's high profitable healthcare system as it was before the Affordable Care Act became law.

And Republicare was a disaster that killed many people and drove many others into bankruptcy. The Affordable Care Act, warts and all, is infinitely better than a Republicare, in which you might pay into your healthcare insurance provider for 40 years only to get dumped as soon as you get really sick and start reducing that insurer's profits.

Republicare is the most billionaire-friendly healthcare system on Earth. But for us non-billionaires, the idea that it's preferable to the ACA would only make sense to someone completely blinded by right wing ideology.

And that's why Republicans NEVER talk about what we'll get if they get what they want. They want us to look at the ACA without regard to the only alternative they've given us: nothing.

And Nothing is what Republicare is.

A new precedent was not established in the U.S.Senate today

Today the U.S. Senate majority changed the Senate rules to ban filibusters for presidential appointments (apart from Supreme Court nominations).

Sounds radical, and the Democrats who support this had mostly spoken out in defense of the filibuster eight years ago.

Also, the Senate has never changed its rules mid-session.

But it's the Republicans who actually changed the rules at the start of President Obama's presidency. Not the way the rules are written. Instead they changed the traditional way the filibuster has been used--that is, to block the appointment of a presidential appointee you believe isn't qualified for the post.

Instead the Republican leadership decided to use the mechanism of the filibuster to try to nullify the results of the presidential election. The Senate's rules protect the rights of the minority party. They were not intended to permit the minority party to rule the country as if it had won the election.

The Constitution obviously intends for presidential appointments to be confirmed or denied by 51% or more of the Senate. Not 60%. The Republicans' abuse of the rules--unlike how either Democrats or Republicans had applied them before President Clinton was elected, and in spades since President Obama was elected--that abuse gave a minority of less than 50% of the Senate a veto not only over presidential appointments but over letting agencies function whose leadership appointments are being blocked.

And now they're also using the filibuster to block nominations over unrelated issues, just because their veto power gives them a lever.

This amounts to trying to run America as if they'd won the last two presidential elections.

Which is not just intolerable--it's also the unprecedented change made in the how the Senate works by the Republicans five years ago, which the Democratic leadership has now finally recognized...and dealt with.

You can be sure the Republicans will abuse their majority status if they win control of the Senate again, just as they've been abusing their minority status. They will wield today's rules change ruthlessly. But there's no guarantee they wouldn't do that anyway--especially given their behavior during the past half-decade.

But even more importantly, if the Senate majority hadn't done what they did today they would simply be continuing to cede control-- a systematic, aggressive control--of the United States Senate by the side that lost the last election. They lost the House, except their gerrymandering and voter suppression gave them a House majority. They lost the Senate and the presidential race outright.

And today their determination to practice minority rule was thwarted in one major area.

One trait the Republican leadership has shown consistently is the belief that Democrats are weak, Republicans are strong. So Republicans can push the Democrats around with impunity because they have a monopoly on manly toughness.

The Imperial Japanese high command made the same mistake about their enemy in 1942.

Affordable Care Act enrollment software is a worse mess than the Administration admits; but this has nothing to do with the value of ACA

I voted for the President twice, and support him and the ACA now. Whatever the virtues or defects of the ACA are, the quality of the implementing software is a separate issue--one which the Republicans are now gleefully trying to conflate with the ACA itself.

They're wrong, but it now looks like the Obama administration is doing its best to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Huge software systems--such as the software running the banks' automated tellers--is a challenge to design and implement. There are numerous examples in both the private and public sector of spectacular failures. But I've never had an automated teller make a mistake with my deposits or withdrawals, and probably you haven't either.

Providing such crappy software to implement the ACA is an indictment of the computer savvy of the current administration. I realize that the alternative--the status quo--was the real slow-motion trainwreck. As you watch this administration wrestle with getting their software to implement ACA up and running, remember that.

Meanwhile this will become at least half of what the right wing media harp on for the forseeable future. It will help the GOP's far right try to distract attention from the mess they've made of the GOP.

Nobody wants to admit that the Constitution is broken

The Constitution was designed to prevent majoritarianism--the tyranny of the majority. Perhaps this was a response to the years of arbitrary rule from the other side of the Atlantic, fresh in the memories of all the Founders.

The problem is that the Constitution succeeded so well at this that it left America vulnerable to minoritarianism--the tyranny of the minority.

This is why subsequent democracies adopted a parliamentary system instead of ours. That system isn't perfect--none is or ever will be--but it does enable government to function, while also enabling the majority's decisions to be challenged electorally whenever the tide goes against those in power.

Whereas our system enables a small minority to sabotage government and, in the case of America, even the world economy. No one is ever responsible for anything, because each can always point the finger at the other and say "If not for their interference Paradise would have been ours."

That's one of the worst consequences of our system: the dilution of responsibility for what the government does or doesn't do.

One thing would go a long way to fix this, short of a Constitution Convention leading to the adoption of a parliamentary system (the system that works efficiently for most of our fellow rich nations): a Constitutional amendment mandating nonpartisan redistricting nationwide.

That isn't a cure-all but it would reduce today's invulnerable  incumbency in most Congressional seats--and it would eliminate the ability of Republicans in some states to control the state legislature despite being in the minority in some states they control.

Who's playing with fire?

"Capitalism is like fire: a good servant but a bad master."

"Government is like fire: a good servant but a bad master."

Q. Which of these statements is true?
A. Wrong question–because both of these statements are true--




Something many Republicans and some Democrats don't understand.

Why did the Republicans think President Obama would cave in they precipitated an economic crisis?

Part of being a partisan ideologue--a key part--is gut-level contempt of your opponents. You're strong, they're weak. At best they're crafty. But they lack your own moral fiber, your warrior spirit, your nobility. They're all hat, no cattle.

This constantly leads partisans to underestimate the opposition. It's why the Japanese High Command decided to attack us at Pearl Harbor.

Partisans tend to be heedless of consequence. Their own inner song fires them up. They're driven by belief, not estimation.

And they see pragmatism and a willingness to compromise as lack of principle. They cannot grasp the concept of someone being willing to compromise because of their principles.

So they figure Obama is spineless and will always cave. It never occurred to them that he might compromise for the sake of the nation--and, later, under different circumstances, refuse to compromise--also for the sake of the nation. You've seen how they caricaturize Libruls as unpatriotic, selfish. lazy. Someone like this would indeed knuckle under in the face of Republican masculine aggression.

Especially considering the extraordinary level of harm the Republicans will do to the nation if the President doesn't cave and they carry through on their threat to cause a national credit default.

There are plenty of Republicans who aren't partisan ideologues. And there are certainly Democrats who are partisan ideologues. The difference is that the Democratic Party's partisan ideologues aren't in charge of their party. No Drama Obama is as cool under fire as any President we've had. Leftist ideologues think he's a closet Republican in fact--something no right wing ideologue has any idea of, since they get all their information from ideological media.

On the other hand, while the last Republican candidate seemed cool and collected--his ideological character showed in the fact that he was so certain of victory--despite every major poll saying otherwise--on election night he didn't even have a concession speech prepared because he was so certain of victory. That's the blindness of the ideologue.

And who's in charge of the Republican Party now? Seems like Ted Cruz, with John Boehner trying to stay ahead of him and not get Primaried. Boehner is not a radical Republican, but he is deeply committed to keeping his job, so all his ranting and calumnies serve to show how the crazies are running the asylum on the right hand side of the aisle, such that even the non-crazies have to act crazy just to hold onto their gigs.

This is what happens when you only listen to people who already agree with you and then attack someone who appears to have read Lao Tzu....

False equivalence--the propagandist's Plan B

If your side is losing an argument--or if it's losing an argument in the eyes of a definable voter bloc--your fallback is to get voters to blame both sides equally rather than your side exclusively.

This line of argument uses the unspoken assumption that it's "fair" to do so--as if a dialog between an extortionist and his intended victim is morally equivalent, and it's incumbent on the intended victim to split the difference with his extortionist, or he's to blame if the deal falls through.

It's part and parcel of seeing politics as sports, where it's about your side winning and the other side losing, not about doing right by the voters.

Your goal as a propagandist is to keep your base fired up and voting in droves while depressing the other side and getting them to not vote at all.

And in between your base and the other side's base is all those people who might vote either way. You want them to vote your way, of course, but if you're losing a big public debate the likelihood of that is debatable--in which case you just want them to not vote.

That's when the "a pox on Washington--on both your houses"  argument gets trotted out. You try to get wafflers whose vote you've lost to wax cynical and just walk away rather than vote against your side.

Propaganda pays off

Talk about getting bang for your buck. Read down the comment threads on articles about the current government shutdown crisis-and you'll see that the massive, multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign carried on year after year at the behest of a few thousand billionaires and multimillionaires...has been amazingly successful.

We know a lot more about the human mind than we did even a few decades ago. And amoral people with a vast sense of entitlement have paid skilled operatives to use that knowledge to get many millions of Americans to believe a long list of "facts" that are not factually true.

However, those lies are woven into a pandering, emotionally self-satisfying narrative that makes more "sense" to the average Republican voter than ambiguous, messy reality does.

Reality doesn't stand a chance.

The result is people like the commentors here who absolutely believe that they know more about the Constitution than the Supreme Court and the constitutional lawyer who's our President, more about civics than civics teachers...these are people who believe the political things they believe with same fervor that the more fervent Fundamentalist Christians or Muslims or Jews or Hindus or Buddhist apply to their religious beliefs.

You will also see that this propaganda campaign has inoculated them against reality--given them bogus counter-arguments but even more important, gotten them to believe that Democrats are the enemies of America, and therefore they need not listen to a single word any Democrat says.
When you talk with them in person you can see their faces close up, at which point nothing you say will be processed in their cerebral cortex--it all gets shunted down to the emotional centers in the middle of the brain.

The irony being that their leaders are their actual enemies--enemies who've convinced their victims that they're their friends, in a massive Stockholm Syndrome.

Thus the .1% have become the most successful parasites in Nature--parasites whose victims eagerly present themselves to them to get sucked dry, and then turn angrily on those who are trying to save them.

Apart from the moral horror, it's quite impressive to watch.

The current impasse isn't a constitution crisis--not in the sense that anyone is acting unconstitutionally at least

In fact no one is acting unConstitutionally. The problem is that the Constitution didn't anticipate the existence of political parties--they didn't exist when it was written--much less one party that's willing to default on a country's debt payments when that country is easily able to make those payments--probably for the first time in the history of the human race.

So a constitutional crisis isn't being precipitated in the normal sense of the phrase. Now the President might precipitate a constitutional crisis if he made the payments despite Congress not authorizing him to do so, but he's stated that he won't do so. It is constitutional for the Republican Party to plunge America--and the world with it--into a colossal fiscal crisis, and it's constitution for the President to stand by as they do.

What's scariest is that in their ruthlessly gerrymandered bunkers--er, districts--these Republican congressmen's voters have been given a very emotionally satisfying, albeit totally false, line of malarkey that blames the President and his party for all this when in fact it's a crisis entirely manufactured by the GOP in an effort to effectively nullify the results of the last national election--which they've already nullified in party by gerrymandering, because if every state had been reapportioned nonpartisanly as California has been, the House would have a Democratic majority today.

Today's GOP is a Frankienstein's Monster created by a small group of very wealthy people bent on letting nothing stand in the way of more profit for them today, regardless of consequence. But now they're created a party that's so anti-government it's threatening the profits of the very people who created them.

Poetic justice. Too bad it'll drag down the rest of us with them.

Is it the Right vs. the Left--or the Right + the Left vs. the rest of us? At the local level, it's the latter.

If the Left seems to think the corporations can do no right, the Right reciprocates by thinking they can do no wrong. The notion that they've already paid the taxes on the money where it was made is part of this touching faith in corporate saintliness. As I said earlier, I don't think corporations are wicked. Just profit-seeking entities which are, however, distorted by the efforts of many of their executive suites to profit themselves, independent of what's done for the shareholders.

Time after time the executive class has managed to decouple itself from the fortunes of both their corporations and their nations (to the degree that the major corporations have any real ties to any one nation). Thus executive compensation has been shown to have zero degree of correlation with corporate profitability.

Yet this small group of a few thousand people, along with their families and hangers-on, have managed to persuade roughly a third of the nation to virtually worship them. To believe that all good in the land flows from their hands. That without them the nation would wither on the vine. And that the only alternative to their unfettered action is some home-grown version of the Soviet State.

How fitting, then, that the high priestess of this secular religion was a lady who'd seen her parents' property confiscated by the Bolsheviks and concluded that all government is inherently evil.

I've concluded that every locus of power is inherently self-aggrandizing and requires some form of checks and balances--and transparency.

For example, my city's government is controlled by right wing developers and left wing public employee unions and trade unions. Public input is solicited, politely listened to, then completely ignored. The only thing the city council listens to--apart from their patrons--is referendums and elections.

And the constant ranting between right wingers and left wingers is useless at this local level, since at this level--as is true in most cities, I suspect--the issue is an alliance of right wing and left wing special interests against the vast majority of the city's residents.

Do you have a passport?

I've read that more than 3 out of 4 Americans don't have a passport. Not good. America's a big country and one of the most diverse on Earth. We went on a 2,500 mile camping trip around the national parks of the Southwest a few years ago, and it was great. But spending time in other countries provides more than a vacation, more than scenic wonders, more than kicking back at a nice resort. International travel can give you a perspective that's reinforced by physical sensations, personal experience...things you can fall back on later, for a kind of mental nourishment and perspective.

That's even true here in Silicon Valley. My spouse and I have friends from Russia, Ukraine, India, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Scotland, England, Germany, Brazil, and the South (for me it counts as another country). But that's no substitute for breathing another country's air, having to negotiate currency exchange and all the myriad customs and procedures every country has, but which non-travelers take for granted.

We're going to Indonesia ourselves in a few days for a few weeks, traveling with an Indian, several Russians, and a Ukrainian. So we'll be getting multiple cultural perspectives.

People who discuss domestic American politics with no personal experience of how people and governments operate in other countries are flying half-blind--though they rarely realize it.

Of course a few weeks' vacation somewhere doesn't make you an expert. But if you balance that with reading up on that country, you can get a lot out of even fairly brief experiences. We honeymooned in Japan. Just 10 days there, going from Tokyo to the Japanese Alps to Kyoto and back on the bullet train. But I've seen literally hundreds of Japanese movies and studied the country's history and culture. The trip helped. The movies helped. The reading helped. Now at least when I want to consider the Japanese approach to a political issue I have the needed background to start.

So at least I'm eating my own dogfood.

And if you don't have a passport, get one. International travel doesn't have to be all that difficult. Go to an unfamiliar country for the first time with a group that's been there before. That's what we did with Indonesia. Now we're the ones introducing others to the country/language/culture etc.

Lastly, you'll never truly know what it means to be an American until you've traveled abroad.

Two Colorado districts recall Democrats who voted for gun control

What these recall elections reveal most of all is that their advocates' logic & facts are neither logical nor factual--but instead reflect a simplistic, emotionally powerful narrative that's pure propaganda--propaganda spoon-fed to them by their worst enemies, who they mistake for their best friends.

Their worst enemies aren't their boogeymen, the dreaded Gun-grabbin' Metrosexual College boy California Libruls all in cahoots with Uppity Drug-Dealin' Blacks. Their worst enemies are actually the hyper-rich corporatists whose insatiable thirst for More has grabbed away the rank-&-file Republicans' economic security...& then told them that owning an AR-15 with an extended magazine will make up for that.

But an extended-magazine AR-15 can't change the fact that the incomes of the richest 1% have soared into the stratosphere over the last four decades, while most everyone else's has stagnated or gone overseas. However, modern economics are incredibly complicated. Guns are simple, concrete, satisfying. President Obama was right--these people are over their heads trying to deal with modern life but are too proud to admit it, so they do indeed cling to their guns & their tribalized version of Christianity.

They think the rich, conservative politicians & pundits who look like them are like them. That's tribal thinking at work, & as every con artist from The Music Man to Wayne LaPierre knows, it works like a charm.

These NRA members have been played.

Arguing about religion

To me the real issue is whether people can construct a way to live ethically sans religion. Absent that, it's easy to see how someone religious would feel like attacks on religion are trying to pull the rug out from under him, leaving him with a meaningless, foundation-less existence if he loses his religion.

This is why an avowed atheist can't get elected President in America, and public opinion polls back this up--atheists are generally despised and distrusted by a big majority of Americans. They see atheism as the negation of all they hold dear.

Of course the very word--"atheist"--conveys negation. All it describes is what one doesn't believe, not what one does believe. So it's easy to see why the average American would think that atheists believe nothing.

Past that it's tough to describe to a religious person how one's life is organized--other than as a sociopath--if one is not religious. Most religious people believe that only religious people have the feelings of care for others, of empathy, of kindness that they and their co-believers claim exclusive possession of.

For me a person's stated beliefs are only meaningful as I see them acted on in our day to day existence. What you do is who you are no matter what you say.

So if someone's a jerk, whether they're a Catholic jerk or a Methodist jerk or a Zoroastrian jerk or an atheistic jerk, what I care about is their being a jerk. Ditto if they're nice guys, if they're interesting to be around, if their word turns out to mean something.

Your beliefs are your business. Your actions are society's business. I will infer your real beliefs from your real actions, and that's what I'll go on.

Bomb Syria.

Today, with the self-righteous blinders on our hindsight, we condemn Neville Chamberlin for his policy of "peace in our time" appeasement of Hitler.

This is unfair to Chamberlain, to a degree--because he was expressing the will of the English people at that time. World War I had exhausted the English and killed a generation of young men in the trenches of Europe. The last thing they wanted was another war. So they demanded peace at any price, at any sacrifice of anyone who wasn't English.

They paid an enormous price for their shortsightedness.

Now Assad isn't Hitler. Syria is a patch on the 3rd Reich powerhouse. The price of our standing aside will be lower than the price England paid, and Assad at his worst will murder far fewer people than Hitler did.

At the same time, however, the price of our involvement would also be a patch on the price England paid when it was eventually forced into WWII, kicking and screaming. At least they didn't roll over like puppy dogs, like the French did.

The real point of the comparison is that the English were dead wrong in 1938 and didn't realize it.

America's doves-on-Syria are equally wrong. Their efforts to minimize what Assad is doing, to claim we can't tell whether the other side didn't really do it, to say it's none of our business, are all--for the most part--efforts to rationalize an unwillingness to expend any of our treasure to save the lives of people-who-are-not-us.

The far Right are at once hawkish and isolationist. This isn't a paradox, because both are consistent with being tribal. And Syrian women and children aren't included in what they see as our tribe. As good tribalists they're unable to empathize with innocent civilians who aren't part of our tribe, and we haven't been attacked, so their hawkishness isn't triggered.

Plus many of them are sufficiently racist that they're inflamed with a permanent, seething rage at that Uppity Negro in the White House. If he's for it they're against it--almost without regard to anything else.

The far Right are pacifistic. It's amazing to see their moralistic posturing against the American government for thinking of attacking one of the worst governments on Earth--while letting that Worst Government off the hook--is truly amazing. These people are not isolationist. In fact they tend to downplay the importance of national sovereignty--they believe we should give Mexican citizens American citizenship practically for the asking, because the Mexicans are poor and suffering.

Well the Syrians are poorer and suffering vastly more. But it will take acts of war to save those suffering Syrians.

Which means that for the Far Left, others' suffering doesn't matter if it would require action by our armed forces to right the wrongs involved.

This is simply cowardice.

The people who oppose hammering the Syrian government say the President hasn't thought through the potential consequences, which are unpredictable. But they aren't fully unpredictable. Russia isn't going to go to war with us over this because they possess a grossly inferior military establishment relative to ours. We would do to them what they did to Georgia. Syria isn't going to declare war on us, any more than they declared war on Israel when Israel took out missle shipments headed for Hezbollah.

We can't predict who will win this three-way civil war in Syria. But we can predict what will happen if we do nothing, given that Syria is being actively supported by Russia and Iran and the rebels don't have what they'd need to shoot down the government's choppers and jets or take out its tanks.

Right now the Russians are running their mouths about America's weakness. That isn't reason enough to start shooting, but it is a factor that will come into play in other situations. The notion that we're a paper tiger tends to make other governments misunderstand what America can do when sufficiently roused. But you have to use your warmaking power least when others are most convinced you will use it where you say it's important to you.

Both action on Syria and inaction over Syria have long-term consequences. The pity is that we're now suffering the long-term consequence of the previous Republican administration's military recklessness and arrogance. That consequence will go on for decades. This is not, however, an excuse for America withdrawing to our borders and telling the world to go hang itself. Which it will without the moral and physical force of the world's most powerful country continuing its thankless but necessary--for US--role of World's Cop.

As for Syria, America is the world's Shabbas Goy

Around the world, nobody civilized wants Syria's dictator to be allowed to murder over 100,000 innocent civilians--thousands with nerve gas.

And around the world, nobody civilized wants their government to go to war with Syria to stop the dictator and his allies.

And around the world, nobody civilized wants to ask America to stop this mass murder of civilians.

They want America to stop the mass murder without the world's permission.

It's a win-win. You get to demonstrate against the hated Big Bully of the World while America does the unpleasant, deadly work without which Syria's dictator will never stop--not as long as anyone is left alive in Syria who opposes him.

Meaning that America is the world's Shabbas Goy.

In strict Orthodox Judaism, from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday, you aren't allowed to do secular things like turning on the AC or the radio or getting takeout from the Chinese-To-Go place on the corner. But you can let a Goy (non-Jew) do it for you. But only if you don't ask him. He has to guess what you want, because asking him would break the rule.

That's us. War is so horrible. And Europeans know this from millennia of wars fought on every square foot of European soil, over and over and over. The last war fought on American soil (apart from Oahu and the Aleutians) was 150 years ago, and it's still being refought on the downlow by the revanchist Southerners who are now the hard core of the Tea Party and hence of the GOP--in part because it was on their soil that the war was fought. No real wars have ever been fought in the state I live in, not since the dawn of history. So for me the Civil War is a history book thing--especially since I don't see blacks as The Other.

Imagine what it's like for the Euros. Practically every sizeable plot of arable land could have a plaque commemorating some battle or other--maybe a bunch.

And of course Syria is a very tricky situation with more than two sides. You've got the Sunni majority pitted against everyone else (mostly Shiites and related sects). You've got the educated and the middle class and probably a solid majority of Syrians who want a secular democracy--at least as secular as Turkey's. You've also got Islamist militants who want a theocracy couple with exterminating Christianity and the Shiite branch of Islam in Syria. You've got the Christian minority who are terrified of a post-dictator Syria treating them like post-Saddan Iraq has.

You've also got the bad reputation the Republicans gave America with their trillion dollar (over time) invasion and occupation of the country that hadn't attacked us, based on trumped-up charges and an activist but incurious President telling the world "Trust us." In addition you've got the same administration's incompetent, attention-deficit mishandling of Afghanistan. All within the last decade or so.

And the world has mass murder and mayhem going on elsewhere as well--the Eastern Congo, Sudan, China's stealthy ethnicide of the nation of Tibet. Though weapons of mass destruction aren't being used anywhere else to my knowledge.

At any rate anyone around the world who opposes American intervention in Syria can give a lot of reasons for waving placards and denouncing those Warmonger Americans.

I'm sure Dr. Assad the Ophthalmologist is touched by all the support he's getting. If you look at the demonstrations around the world you'd think it was the Americans who were dropping nerve gas on thousands of noncombatants including small children. This is eased by the fact that the murdered civilians aren't Europeans, aren't Anglo Whites. They're Muslim, so they're part of the vast Other whose lives and deaths appear not to be very meaningful to most Rich World inhabitants.

But in the last analysis I think a majority of the rich world's populations want us to stop Assad from using WMDs and then blame us for whatever we do to accomplish that--even if killing a hundred civilians saved 10,000 lives that would otherwise have been lost.

Best quote from the Sunday talk shows today

About the Republicans clamoring for President Obama to go to Congress about whether we should strike Syria over its use of WMDs:

"The dog has caught the car."
        --David Axelrod

However, that said, I worry that President Obama may not be familiar with the principles of war as laid out by Von Clausewitz, the 19th century Prussian officer who's still the most-quoted military scientist in the war colleges.

And I think Von Clausewitz would say that "proportionate" strikes are useless. What's useful is DISproportionate strikes. If our strike hammered every major fixed installation Syria's government has got--took out its air defense system, cratered every one of its airfields, took out every chopper and airplane they've got that's findable, and much more. The nice thing about attacking a country instead of a nongovernment operator like Al Qaeda is that every national government has lots of fixed assets that are much easier to target.

That said, politically speaking, however the Republicans construe President Obama going to Congress as him blinking, him being weak yada yada--if they don't OK this strike they're going to be the ones who are American fries-eating surrender monkeys--contrary to the Republican Party's self image as the swaggering, macho tough guys.

And if they do OK this strike they can't blame him for the results afterwards, because they'll share in those results for better or for worse. Not to mention the fact the Republicans used WMDs as the pretext for invading another country and socking America with the trillion-dollar tab--and that little boo-boo is doubtless why the Brits refused to side with us this time around. A Republican administration made a mockery of America's credibility with the world, and we'll be playing the diplomatic price for that for decades.