About to be a Millionaire!

One Million Views! 

I guess it's time to let go those 97 Bangladeshi teenagers I have working for me for $1/week hitting return, return, return, return . . .


Thanks to all, and, of course, I forgot to mention that from now on it will be $2/view . .  . pay wall, just like the MSM .  . . and look at how well that's worked out for them!

Now back to getting up off the floor after reading that the GOP in Congress is caving to Obama.

Congress: Vote NO on Syria Attack

There is no simple, clean, consequence-free exit from the box into which the horribly inept Obama misadministration has placed the US vis-a-vis Syria. Every egress plan has downsides. In sum, US national interests have been damaged by Obama's Syria fiasco; US interests will be damaged ending the fiasco.

The "handling" of Syria by the incompetent boobs running our government shows, once again, how liberals do not understand a basic fact of international life: the word of the US president on foreign affairs must be akin to an IOU note backed by gold coin. The president should issue such a note sparingly and only when sure he has that coin. For reasons known only to Obama and whomever he has as foreign affairs advisors--and that remains murky--this misadministration decided to say, I repeat to say, a couple of years ago that any use by the murdering Assad regime of chemical weapons was unacceptable and a threat to the United States.

Some time back I noted that,

If you want a clue on dealing with Arab states, don't look to the State Department or the NSC--especially under Susan "It's YouTube's fault" Rice. Look to the Israelis. For them it is literally a matter of life or death who runs the corrupt Arab regimes in the neighborhood. The Israelis detest the Assad regime and have fought a continuous war with it since 1970. They also detested Arafat, and any number of other Arab dictators. They, however, were and are very cautious about promoting regime change. Despite numerous opportunities, for example, they never killed Arafat; they dropped people all around him, but never him. Who would replace him? Nobody knew, so better stick with the disgusting but inept known devil than risk getting someone or something much worse. The Israeli military and intel services, likewise, repeatedly have demonstrated an ability to strike deep into Syria and successfully take out major targets. They, however, have not targeted Assad, father or son. The assumption being that the Assad clan knows where to draw the line and not cross it for fear of engendering a regime-killing Israeli response.

It is not clear, as I have noted, why the deaths of 1400 Syrians by gas are more threatening to the US than the deaths of 100,000 Syrians by more conventional weapons, and continue to note the uneasy silence from the Israelis. All that, however, now is one giant "never-mind." The President of the United States has said chemical weapon use by Assad would pose a threat to core US interests. Our rodeo-clown SecState, furthermore, has stated that Assad, indeed, has used these weapons and, he said, that requires an immediate response by the United States, with or without the UN or our traditional allies. The British, of course, have said "No, thanks," and the French are looking for a way out of their initial support for Obama.

The President and the SecState have said Obama has the authority to strike Syria with or without Congressional approval--the kind that Bush got, but liberals seem to have forgotten. The Pentagon has moved ships into position, and more are on the way. The hammer has been cocked and . . . eased back down. In a rambling, disjointed follow up statement, Obama has said that, well, after all, he wants Congressional approval to engage in a limited warning strike of brief duration that will involve no major US military presence with the objective of . . . we don't know. He also undermined John "Xmas in Cambodia" Kerry by saying that, well, there is no hurry, and that we can strike whenever we want, now, tomorrow, in a week, in a couple of months, it's all good, dude . . . time for some golf with the ever-grinning Joe "The Plugs Don't Hurt Anymore" Biden.

My recommendation, for what little value it has, is for Congress to vote "NO," unless the misadministration comes up with a real, solid thought-through proposal with goals and an exit plan. President Obama built this bizarre structure, he should get full credit for it. He should be told, you didn't want us in on the take-off, don't call us in on the crash landing. This is a tough thing for me to recommend. I have spent some 34 years in the Foreign Service, and have seen up close what happens when the President of the United States has no credibility. A "NO" vote by Congress could embolden Assad, but then it is not clear that a "YES" vote would deter him; it might embolden him even more when the smoke clears after the limited, brief, minimal pain attack and he still stands. A "YES" vote would make Congress, and the Republicans, complicit in an extremely foolish and poorly designed policy with some potentially very nasty fall-out.

As stated at the outset, every action has a negative consequence. Having the President humiliated by Congress is not a good thing on the international scene, no matter how much he deserves it. This President, however, has said that he has the authority to act and that the situation in Syria is worthy of exercising that authority. If he really believes that, and is willing to "man up" and accept the consequences of his policy, then he should go ahead and strike Syria. He should deal with the consequences of whacking a hornet's nest with a very small bat. Let Obama prove his mettle as a leader.

Whatever happens, we will have to hunker down and try to ride out the next three years of incompetence and the consequences such incompetence brings.

I repeat, let him own it. He built it.

UPDATE: For a different view see Legal Insurrection's thoughtful post on this matter

Ted Mack! Calling Ted Mack! Please Pick up Your Royalty Check at the Rose Garden!

Well, our "leader," the "leader" of the now not-so Free World, the Commander-in-Chief of the Air, Naval, and Land Forces of the United States of America finally made an appearance. The man who loves to talk; loves being on TV hour after hour; who masters the teleprompter like no other being on Gaia's warming surface finally ended his reclusion to talk about the war he wants to start. He, at long last, came out from behind the Kerry mask, and "made his case for war!"

With rousing rhetoric evoking the goose-bump inducing eloquence of Henry V's St. Crispin's Day speech, as he strapped on his armor, and rose upon his mount, he belted out,

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Ok, Ok, that was the imaginary president, my "composite" president. The one the low-info voters elected--along with the double voters in Ohio and elsewhere--the real President, insofar as one can use the word "real" when talking about Obama, made a bungled, jumbled, rambling statement of, well, words, yes, words--no thinking, just empty words.

The presumed Assad gas attack,

presents a serious danger to our national security. It risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons. It endangers our friends and our partners along Syria’s borders, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. It could lead to escalating use of chemical weapons, or their proliferation to terrorist groups who would do our people harm. 

In a world with many dangers, this menace must be confronted. 

Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets. This would not be an open-ended intervention. We would not put boots on the ground. Instead, our action would be designed to be limited in duration and scope. But I’m confident we can hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior, and degrade their capacity to carry it out.

Why does the death by gas of over 1000 Syrians present "a serious danger to our national security?" The death of some 100,000 Syrians before that didn't seem to pose a threat, how is this different?  Well, because it threatens "our friends and partners." I see. None of those threatened--Israel is a special case--seems willing to join us in punishing Assad. How does Assad's putative use of chemical weapons "lead to an escalating use of chemical weapons?" By whom? Israel, Turkey, Cyprus? "Proliferation to terrorist groups?" Presumably Assad has had these weapons for years, why would he now use them, AND give them to terrorist groups? Which terrorist groups? Why hasn't he done that before? Now, before anybody goes ballistic here, I can think of some answers to these questions, but why doesn't the President provide them?

OK, we are going to take "military action against Syrian regime targets. . . . This would not be an open-ended intervention . . . [no] boots on the ground . . . limited in duration and scope." I see. So we have just told Assad that the whole thing won't be too bad, not too long, and might come after Congress debates it. So Assad is just going to sit there? I will bet anything those chem weapon labs are being emptied and scattered around the countryside, and air defenses are being strengthened.

If you are going to do a limited, "warning shot across the bow" sort of operation you do it in the middle of the night, no warning. The "warning" comes the next day, when you tell the miscreant, that the attack was the warning and is just a taste of what is to come. Will it work? Maybe. It didn't work when Clinton launched his 23 cruise missiles against some empty Iraqi government buildings. It did work, for a bit, when Reagan hit Qaddafi after the Berlin disco bombing.

More important, if this crisis gets complicated, who trusts Obama and Kerry to be resolute leaders? Nobody. Is there any doubt that Obama would cut and run?

This is rank amateurism.  Obama has no idea what to do, so he punts. He has kicked the ball to Congress, hasn't called them back to the game, just told them you guys debate it, and let me know. Oh, and, of course, this is more important than defunding Obamacare, investigating Benghazi, looking into the IRS or Fast and Furious. No hurry. We can leave our ships out there for months if need be. Joe, let's head for the links!

Syria and Thoughts on Things We are Decreed to Hate

Don't get angry with me over this post. Don't start citing international law to counter my thoughts. I am just thinking out loud, engaging in a bit of modern blogger angst of the existentialist sort, "analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad."

I watched what I could stand of SecState John "Xmas in Cambodia" Kerry's presentation of "evidence" on Assad's use of chemical weapons. I kept thinking, "Where is the President? Why is some appointed flunkey doing this?" On Bengahzi, the SecState disappeared and left the heavy lifting and big lying to Hackmistress Susan "YouTube did it" Rice. On Syria, Obama disappears and leaves the heavy lifting and, well, is Kerry lying? I don't know. Could the AQ-allied rebels have used or misused gas weapons in Syria? Yes, of course, well, maybe, oh, who knows? Could the President of Syria have used chemical weapons on the people of Syria? Sure, why not, I guess. Saddam certainly did it in 1988. Have others used gas weapons? They were widely used in the First World War, and Mussolini used mustard gas in Ethiopia. There were lots of ultimately unproven allegations of Soviet use of gas in Afghanistan. I know. I used to run around the Pak-Afghan border interviewing "survivors" of these gas attacks, but never became fully convinced that the story was not just anti-Soviet propaganda. Kerry's presentation, likewise, had lots of assertions but was remarkably content free.

Gas. It provokes a revulsion among most people. We, for example, no longer use the gas chamber for executions to dispatch murderers on their journey to their maker, or, at least, to His rival below. Instead we use a cocktail of drugs in a lethal injection, something I find even more repellant than gas given the elaborate quasi-medical procedure that surrounds that cocktail's use . . . but, back to history and international politics. Despite the temptation, the US did not use gas against well-entrenched Japanese troops in the Pacific, even when gas likely could have saved many American lives. FDR did not want to be known as the President who used gas--he, of course, was developing an atomic bomb, but, more on that later. There are all sorts of international treaties, conventions, protocols, and such banning the use of chemical (and biological) weapons.

We didn't use gas in WWII either in the European or the Pacific theaters. No. Instead we used atomic bombs to obliterate two Japanese cities. I think the decision to use those bombs was the right one, as I have stated before. Those bombs saved millions of lives and shortened the war considerably. No sooner had we used these two "miracle" weapons, but that we were repulsed by them and spent the next seventy years bad mouthing them, trying to design bureaucratic and legal structures to make sure they got never used again, while simultaneously building a huge arsenal of them and molding our national security strategy around them. We, of course, also never felt the same repulsion over the conventional bombing of Japan and Germany which killed many more people than those two A-bombs. We never used nukes again, even when we fought two major wars in Asia, i.e., Korea and Vietnam, where their use or threatened use probably would have assured victory and saved lots of American lives. Instead, we bombed and napalmed. I guess death by daisy cutters or flaming gelled gasoline is less of a death than one by gas or nukes. We, likewise, have some amazing thermobaric weapons which do a real number on personnel in enclosed structures. Those deaths, too, I guess, are lesser deaths compared to the ones caused by gas. I leave that debate to the philosophers and lawyers who enjoy arguing whether a tree falling makes noise if nobody is around to hear it.

Back to Syria and gas weapons. For the sake of argument assume Assad used them; for the further sake of argument, and this is a stretch, assume the Obama misadministration knows and is telling the truth. Does use of gas in Syria, resulting in some 1400 dead, present a danger to US national interests? Is it more of a danger than the death of 1400 Syrians, say, by an intense bombing campaign? What if those people, including the 400 or so children, had been killed when a building collapsed on them after an artillery round crashed into the structure? Would Kerry be there filling in for the President trying to make a case for war on behalf of a group of jihadi organizations? Are these 1400 deaths more important than the alleged 100,000 that have preceded them in Syria?

Back to gas: Is there evidence that these weapons will be used against the US or an ally, e.g., Turkey, Israel, or even another country, e.g., Cyprus? Saddam killed thousands with gas, as well as with more conventional weapons, posed a continuos threat to his neighbors, provoked a massive war with Iran, openly abetted terrorism, and according to all the intel organizations of the world, sought a nuclear weapons' capability. He was an avowed enemy, yet Senator Kerry and many of the Democrats now baying for war just couldn't see the reason to attack.

Now, of course, things are different. The liberals are in charge, and they know what's best. The liberals are doing what they always do. They drive their agenda with emotion, with emotion-laden words, e.g., gas, racism, poverty. As I will write elsewhere, they do that because it's easy; it's easy to be a liberal. Throw out some words and reality is expected to conform to them. The word "gas" is supposed to make us stop thinking, and stop asking our "leaders" to explain the US interest in attacking Syria in what seems will be a half-baked manner that will do nothing except make Obama and Kerry look macho and appear as guardians of humanity.

We have been Pavlovian conditioned to respond to "gas."

Just wondering about it all.

WLA

From Cowboy to Mau-Mau Diplomacy

What are we doing?

What exactly or even approximately are we doing on Syria?

The news gets weirder and weirder. The latest is that the UK is out, out of . .  . what exactly were we doing? Oh, yes, something "limited and brief" with no intention of provoking regime change. We, according to no less a military expert than our Commander-in-Chief, seek to

"take limited tailored approaches, not getting drawn into a long conflict — not a repetition of Iraq, which I know a lot of people are worried about — but if we are saying, in a clear and decisive, but very limited way we send a shot across the bow, saying, ‘stop doing this,’ that can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term and may have a positive impact in the sense that chemical weapons are not used again on innocent civilians.”

Uh, what? He's certainly not repeating Iraq where President Bush had a Congressional OK, an impressive international coalition, and a military punch that Saddam would not be able to withstand. Obama is warning Assad that we are going to send a shot across the bow, but in a limited way, sorry, in a very limited way, to say "stop doing this." I see. That's going to impress Assad, that pencil-necked swine friend of Nancy Pelosi's? Wow! He must be sweating bullets . . . or, more likely, busting a gut laughing his behind off at the guy who leads from behind, or follows from the front, or whatever it is he does, besides play golf and give historically illiterate speeches.

I have written before how the Democrats have a tradition of mishandling US interests, emphasis added,

Democrats prefer and advocate for U.S. intervention, including messy, bloody, military intervention, in places where there is little or, preferably, no US national interest at stake, e.g., Vietnam, Libya, ex-Yugoslavia. Find a place where there are US interests at risk--e.g., Panama, Central America, Iran, Cuba--they go into pacifist-anti-imperialist-defender-of-the-peoples-of-the-Third-World mode. Also curiously, as we saw most spectacularly in Vietnam, once the US does go in, they quickly begin to doubt the wisdom of the move, and even turn against the US intervention. They know that once we do intervene, even if it was in a place of no or limited importance before, the act of intervening creates US national interests, e.g., the need to show that the US cannot be defeated, that we mean what we say, etc. Once such interests are created, the liberals, "summer soldiers" if there ever were, become very critical of the intervention, and actively work to sabotage the US effort.

Obama and his merry band of morons--kindest word I could generate--decided to be tough on Syria. Better said, to be what they see as passing as tough, you know, two years of desultory debate to draw red lines for US intervention, allowing the jihadi loons to take over the anti-Assad resistance, then announcing, sort of, that the red line, i.e., use of chemical weapons, had been crossed, and that, therefore, we would do something undefined that would be brief and limited, and serve as a "shot across the bow." Now, PM Cameron, Obama's competitor for Dopey Leader of the Year, couldn't get his Parliament to go along with, well, uh, with whatever it is that is to be done somehow.

Now, guess what? If we don't act, but in something more than just a brief and limited shot across the bow, we have lost. That's the way the world works. If you announce or imply that you are going to do something, you damn well better do it, especially when the Iranians are threatening you. If you don't do it, the Iranians win. Remember Bin Ladin's comment about people going with "the strong horse"? You don't want the Iranians to be that horse, not if you're a real President of the United States--but now I really have crossed into Fantasy Land from Bizarro World.

Let's not forget, that all this nonsense has real world implications. Not just in a policy sense, but in a more human sense. People, our people, could die; I don't care about Assad's people or the AQ creeps on the other side. What reason do we give grieving parents, brothers, sisters, children to explain why their loved ones died in Syria? A shot across the bow to stop "mistreating" Al Qaeda fanatics, the same people we "drone" nearly every day in many places around the world?

I am beyond appalled and  disgusted. This misadministration is criminally inept.

WLA

Liberals, Words, Misery, and Death

Some years ago, more than I care to recount, I served at the US Mission to the UN. Years later, again, more than I care to count or admit, I served at the US Mission to the OAS. Much of the work involved fighting over obscure resolutions and parsing words, trying to wring every possible definition and interpretation out of words. For some observers this exercise seemed silly, as obscure as some Talmudic scholars arguing over the meaning of a forgotten phrase in the Bible. It was certainly easy to ridicule; I, however, soon discovered that this was far from silly or "just academic" posturing. Words have meaning, and the left is very good at ever so subtly altering the meaning of words so that over time those words no longer mean what they meant. Words, of course, are the bullets of intellectual debate. If you allow your opponent to select your ammo for you, well, let's just say you are at a disadvantage.

I have thought a lot about this these last few days, as I watch our anti-war, Nobel Peace Prize President lead us into another bizarre adventure in not quite war, maybe "a pre-announced shot across the bow," I have no idea what we think we're doing in Syria (a post on that to follow). We apparently are going to put our people's lives and our nation's credibility (what's left of it) at risk for an unknown objective.

I also listened to some of the speeches at the recent event at the Lincoln Memorial allegedly commemorating Martin Luther King's awe-inspiring "I Have a Dream" speech--one of the great speeches in the English language. The words being used are bizarre with no appreciation for their original meaning. The degradation of the language, as Orwell rightly saw in 1984, is essential for regulating thought. That degradation is now on display. One example suffices: speaker after speaker at the Lincoln Memorial told us how racist America remains fifty years after MLK's speech and march. We learned that black lives are considered less valuable than white lives; that, in essence, there is little hope for black people in America, that the KKK, armed wing of the Democratic party, rides in the night as it did one hundred years ago. The event, of course, culminated in a speech by Barack Hussein Obama, black son of a Kenyan student, speaking to the crowd. Obama, of course, is the President of the United States. Would MLK ever in his wildest dreams have predicted that his children would see a black president of the United States? That alone gave the lie to all the words that preceded Obama's appearance. 

Anyhow, all this lead me to repost a little item I wrote several months ago on the disaster that is American liberalism. I am working on a couple of new pieces, at the same time that I deal with the growing demands of dog ownership.

April 30, 2013: "Poverty, Mass Murder, and Liberals: A Complete Package"

Words evolve. They take on new meaning over the years. Social and political movements appropriate certain words, redefine them, and then use them to shape the ideological battlefield. The classic example of that, of course, is "bolshevik" and "menshevik." The Bolsheviks were, in fact, the Mensheviks and vice-versa. The word bolshevik, derived from the word meaning "majority," was appropriated by the radicals who were in reality the minority of the old Social Democratic party. The minority labeled the majority the minority and got away with it. Clever. There are many other examples of this in history such as the insistence on calling nazis and fascists right-wing when they are clearly left-wing products.

In our once great, still beloved, but evermore daft United States, precisely those who are not liberal, as in broad minded and generous in their attitudes towards others, have appropriated "liberal" as theirs. The political philosophy of this "liberalism" is one which portrays life as a series of problems that needs addressing by the state--the state guided and run, mind you, by the "well-educated liberal elite" produced by our increasingly decrepit "liberal" universities and informed by "liberal" Hollywood and "liberal" Big Media. Modern U.S. liberals are a variant of European social democrats who believe in a big state and mistrust the individual; the big difference being that US liberals have much more power in the world than their European co-religionists ever could hope. They advocate the "positivist" attitude so aptly summed up in the motto emblazoned on the national flag of Brazil, "Ordem e Progresso," so long, of course, as they are in charge of imposing the order and defining the progress. They take positivism's emphasis on rational thought and logic, and its opposition to superstition and fantasy, and turn it on its head into a "science-based" fantasy that somehow just so happens to lead to more power for them and their state. Global climate change is one stirling example of how liberals have taken a legitimate scientific-based concern over pollution, and turned it into a monumental hoax, known as Manmade Climate Change. That hoax somehow, just somehow, ends up demanding more money and power for--guess who?--the liberals and their state. As we will discuss, this philosophy comprises followers who proclaim a great love for humanity while in practice exhibiting a great hatred for people.

Sorry for the long-winded intro, but it brings us to today's topic, for which I provide the following bumper sticker, "Liberals love humanity and hate people." Oh, and by the way, liberals will get you killed. Yes, killed. Modern liberalism kills people, and does so by the millions, all in the name of humanity, of course. It should have a warning label that asks you not to practice liberalism at home, or something along the lines of "I am a trained professional, do not attempt liberalism on your own."

Liberals hate all sorts of people but their special, most lethal hatred is reserved for the poor and the "uneducated." They kill the poor by the bushel, by the ton, by the hectare . . . they kill them at home and abroad. No poor person is safe from the lethal loving embrace of the liberals.

So many examples, it's hard to know where to begin. I don't pretend to provide an exhaustive account of liberal mayhem, just a glimpse at the tip of the iceberg. So, where do we start? How about with DDT? This extremely useful pesticide was virtually banned around the globe for decades because of the bogus writings of Rachel Carson, the lesbian biological mother of today's whacky environmental movement. The ban on DDT, ostensibly to save birds, puppies, and other wonderful warm things, resulted in the deaths of millions of poor persons around the globe from malaria and dengue, which came soaring back on the wings of now safe mosquitos. This tradition of sacrificing the poor on the altar of Gaia continues to this day. The insistence on the global warming hoax, long after the "science" has been shown to be false, perpetuates policies, e.g., ethanol in gasoline, opposition to domestic drilling and nuclear energy, that increases the cost of living, promotes food shortages, stifles employment, and, yes, leads to death. The opposition to cheap energy and food, the zoning restrictions in upperclass neighborhoods, all under the guise of protecting the environment, take direct aim at the lives and welfare of the poor. Liberals kill.

Liberal welfare policies create havoc throughout our society. What slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, and racial discrimination could not do, liberal polices have done, to wit, destroy the black family and turn millions of blacks into permanent wards of the state and of the liberal political machines that control most of our cities. Liberal immigration policies, beginning with the disastrous 1965 Kennedy-Johnson immigration law, insure a constant stream of poor third world immigrants, altering irrevocably the nature of our society and ensuring that the struggling black (and white) American poor cannot compete with the ultra-poor pouring in from Mexico, El Salvador, Bangladesh, and so on. Liberal minimum wage laws ensure the disappearance of the starter jobs, once a platform for the poor to spring out of poverty. All of these people, the old poor and the newly arriving poor, need, of course, social programs and more and more government help. The liberal political machine dispenses jobs and money, and the productive sectors face rising taxes, a labyrinth of regulations, and the constant presence of "helpful" government regulators and enforcers. Let the poverty and misery spread!

Liberal gun control policies also target the poor. The poor in our cities must live with the drug dealers, gang bangers, and other hoods in the hood. The comfortable liberals live in secure high-rises, and tony suburbs well protected by overpaid and over equipped police and fire departments and expensive security firms. The poor must put up with the inability to defend themselves; they must allow themselves to be murdered in the name of ridding America of gun violence.

Likewise liberal education policies deny the poor the right to choose the schools their children will attend. Instead an alliance of politicians and teacher unions keeps the poor trapped in failing and unsafe schools, while the wealthy liberals, well, you know what they do, and it isn't to send their own kids to those schools.

The examples are endless. From the liberal refusal to allow us to become energy independent, the liberal refusal to see what Islam does everywhere it takes root, and the liberals' seemingly endless assault on the family, everywhere we look we see the death and destruction that modern liberalism brings to our shores and promotes overseas.

To speak out on this is to risk being labeled a racist and hate-monger. To fail to speak out, however, means being complicit to some of the greatest crimes on the planet: the crimes of the liberals.

WLA

Bomb Until We Think of Something to Do (Repost from the Unpleasant Past)

A little something I wrote about two-and-half years ago, March 25, 2011, to be specific, re the Obama misadministration's most excellent Libyan adventure.

I wrote this shortly after that misadministration had commenced bombing of Libya. I repost it now, to avoid having to do so in the near future as we repeat the previous farce,

"[A]ngry, irritated, and sad over our action in Libya. 

We are now several days into the bombing campaign, and all we have is confusion--oh, yes, and death. Our superb military have, as we all knew they would, quickly established a No-Fly Zone. Was there any doubt they could do that? Now, what? We still have no end game, no exit strategy, no answer to the question, "How do we know when we've won?" Instead, we have bombing. 

President Obama has said Qaddafi must go. OK. So we're going to target him? Apparently not, except when we do, but not really. Have we gone bear hunting with the idea of wounding the bear? Who are the rebels? Does anybody really know? Who's in charge of the rebels? Anybody? What are their goals? The US wants to pass command and control, so to whom? Will it be NATO? Who provides the bulk of NATOs resources and capabilities? One guess, and the answer is not the UK, France, Italy, or Spain . . .  It's a bit like arguing whether a Ford is better than a Mercury. Same factory, folks. Will it be some other harebrained scheme for collective control that will leave the US with the responsibility but not the authority? No answers, so instead we have bombing. 

Above all, however, the administration has not defined our interests. What was so pressing about Libya to excuse the manner in which we got involved? Aren't the people leading the charge into the Libyan desert the same ones who spent years deriding the idea of a threat from Saddam? No answers, so instead, we have bombing. 

Obama and his hopeless coterie must understand that war must form part of a policy, it is not just mindless, bored vandalism. Meanwhile, we will just keep bombing until we think of something to do . . .."

Sigh . . . our King Obama and his Court so like what was said about the Bourbon kings, "They never forget, but they never learn."

Or as Nancy Pelosi might say, "We must bomb Syria to know what is in Syria." We are about to find out.

WLA