Did You Know That In The U.S. There Is No Party That Favors Peace

War-mongers Jason Crow (D-CO) and Liz Cheney (R-WY)

Last week, the House Armed Services Committee-- an aggressively devoted tool of the Military Industrial Complex regardless of which party controls Congress-- voted on an amendment by Jason Crow (New Dem-CO) and Liz Cheney (R-WY) to prevent Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. As expected, it passed, 45-11. Think about that: a committee controlled by Democrats voted to prevent Trump from getting U.S. troops-- who, remember, are being assassinated by criminal elements to earn Russian bounties-- out of the 100% pointless and unwinable war in Afghanistan. How the hell did that happen? Maybe you think the Democratic Party is something different than is? Possible? Our troops have been fighting and dying there for 2 decades and we've wasted over a trillion dollars--much, if not most, of it finding its way into the hands of corrupt Americans and corrupt Afs-- and 2,300 American lives and God knows how many Afghan lives.

Do you recall how last cycle one of the DCCC gimmicks was to run military vets and call them heroes? A lot of them got elected and, guess what-- they all suck-- every single one of them; no exceptions. SUCK! Of the candidates who ran by flaunting their credentials as military heroes, each of them has earned a ProgressivePunch "F" score, even the one who pretended to run as a progressive, Maine reactionary Jared Golden (who Blue America was tricked into endorsing and supporting and even persuading Nancy Ohanian into doing a piece of art for!).

BIG Mistake!

There are 31 Democrats and 26 Republicans on the overstuffed committee, where it is extraordinarily easy to earn bribes from the Military Industrial Complex. Here's how the Democrats voted:

• Adam Smith, chairman (New Dem-WA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Susan Davis (New Dem-CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• James Langevin (RI)- stay in Afghanistan
• Rick Larsen (New Dem-WA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)- stay in Afghanistan
• Joe Courtney (CT)- stay in Afghanistan
• John Garamendi (CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Jackie Speier (CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Tulsi Gabbard (HI)- withdraw troops
• Donald Norcross (New Dem-NJ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Ruben Gallego (AZ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Seth Moulton (New Dem-MA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Salud Carbajal (New Dem-CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Anthony Brown (New Dem-MD)- withdraw troops
• Ro Khanna (CA)- withdraw troops
• William Keating (New Dem-MA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Filemon Vela (Blue Dog-TX)- stay in Afghanistan
• Andy Kim (NJ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)- didn't vote
• Gil Cisneros (New Dem-CA)- didn't vote
• Crissy Houlahan (New Dem-PA)- didn't vote
• Jason Crow (New Dem-CO)- stay in Afghanistan
• Xochitl Torres Small (BlueDog-NM)- stay in Afghanistan
• Elissa Slotkin (New Dem-MI)- stay in Afghanistan
• Mikie Sherrill (Blue Dog-NJ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Veronica Escobar (New Dem-TX)- stay in Afghanistan
• Deb Haaland (NM)- stay in Afghanistan
• Jared Golden (ME)- stay in Afghanistan
• Lori Trahan (New Dem-MA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Elaine Luria (New Dem-VA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)- stay in Afghanistan

I spoke with Ro Khanna after the vote and he told me that "It is appalling that the time Congress would choose to wake up from its slumber on matters of war and peace is to mandate perpetual war and restrict bringing our troops home. Let's be very clear what just happened. The Cheney Crow Amendment is to the right of Trump’s foreign policy and it’s scary how many people voted for it."

Republicans who voted against the bill: Mo Brooks (AL), Bradley Byrne (AL), Scott DesJarlais (TN), Jim Banks (IN) and Austin Scott (GA), although I think one or two others who missed the vote added their names in opposition to the Crow/Cheney amendment.

It confuses some progressives when Trump actually wants to do the right thing-- even if it isn't for "pure" reasons. But in this case, Democrats on the committee should have voted against Crow (one of those DCCC military heroes who was elected in 2018 and has done nothing but suck shit since) and Cheney. I mean anyone can get their head around the idea than a Cheney can bewares then even Trump, right? Anyway, New York Magazine's Eric Levitz set out to help Democrats bridge the gap between righteous Trump hatred and getting out of the fuckingwar already: Please Don’t Prolong a Pointless War Just to Show Russia Who’s Boss. He reminded his readers that "Throughout America’s longest war, top Pentagon and civilian officials deliberately misled the public about the endeavor’s likelihood of success in a bid to insulate their adventure from the threat of democratic rebuke. As the Washington Post reported last fall, summarizing the upshot of various confidential government documents it had obtained, 'it was common at military headquarters in Kabul-- and at the White House-- to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.' John Sopko, the head of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, put the point more plainly: 'The American people have constantly been lied to.' Amid the lies, war crimes, tens of thousands of civilian deaths, egregious corruption, and revival of the Afghan opium trade, some positive developments have accompanied the U.S. invasion. Afghan women have made some real gains in their personal liberty, however limited and fragile. But the U.S. has neither the will nor the capacity to deny the Taliban a role in governing the country. The peace deal that the Trump administration struck with that group in February was an acknowledgment of the inevitable; as such, it was a productive step forward. Under the agreement’s terms, the U.S. will fully withdraw its troops in 14 months, so long as the Taliban upholds its commitments to, among other things, bar Al Qaeda from operating in areas under its control, and participate in 'Intra-Afghan talks' with the government in Kabul, opposition politicians, and various representatives of civil society about the future governance of the country."

To uphold its end of the bargain, the Trump administration plans to reduce America’s troop presence from its current level of 8,600 to 4,500 by this autumn.

But this week, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers erected new barriers to that withdrawal... [T]he House’s conditions are senselessly prohibitive. It’s difficult to see how one could ever withdraw military forces tasked with preventing the formation of terrorist safe havens without increasing the risk of “the expansion of existing or formation of new terrorist safe havens.” But that is not a rational basis for prolonging a 19-year war. The U.S. cannot maintain military occupations in every country where Islamist militants could conceivably gather and plot violence. Nor should it. As COVID-19 and climate change are making clear (or should be), terrorism is a relatively trivial threat, one that has diverted precious resources from pandemic prevention, green-energy transition, and other efforts necessary for mitigating the genuinely catastrophic challenges to Americans’ safety and security.

Congress’s (uncharacteristic) decision to interfere with the executive branch’s conduct in a foreign war was not explicitly tied to recent revelations concerning Russia’s apparent efforts to place bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But given the prominence of that story, it seems reasonable to worry that the issue influenced the House’s action. Especially since one of the amendment’s sponsors suggested that the U.S. must respond to Russia’s treachery by dispelling any question of America’s “will” to defend its interests.

Congress is right to investigate allegations of Russian targeting of U.S. troops and the Trump administration’s handling of relevant intelligence. But Russia’s actions have no bearing on the wisdom of prolonging an unwinnable war. If anything, the vulnerability of U.S. troops to such attacks constitutes an argument for quicker withdrawal. Extending military quagmires to demonstrate our resolve to Moscow was crazy when it was still the world’s second greatest power; doing so now that Russia is a declining petrostate with modest regional influence would be utter madness.

I'm not so sure about this report by Saagar Enjeti, but it's not out-of-hand dismissible and it's definitely worth carefully considering. Listen with an open mind:

Despite right-wingers' decades-long war on U.S. vets, they expect Americans to gobble up their lies -- and they're probably right

by Ken

So Shinseki is gone as VA Sec, no doubt inevitably, and possibly deservedly, though we'll probably never know, since the psychotic lying scumbags who have been leading the assault on him not only are incapable of speaking a word of truth but have now effectively substituted their psychotic lying scumbag agenda for any possible consideration of discovery of truth and fixing it.

Howie wrote the other day about one of the most astonishing of the psychotic lying scumbags, a superscumbag among superscumbags, NC Sen. Richard Burr, a vile pile of puke who deserves someday to have to justify the time he has spent on earth turning it into the hell that he lives in inside his diseased brain.

The fact is that if you took a machete and disassembled Burr and every one of these other psychotic lying scumbags, you wouldn't find a single cell of honesty or decency. Even so, their historic and amply documented hatred of America's heroes is kind of hard to understand, even remembering that we're dealing with psychotic lying scumbags.

For sheer gall, you have to stand back and admire the right-wing screech assault on the VA. I had a fleeting thought to suggest that all the unaccountably uncaged right-wing beasts who are now having fake-orgasmic follies over the VA scandals be asked to pause in their lying orgy or right-wing scumbaggery to chronicle their history of support for veterans' affairs. Then I realized thatit would serve no purpose, since gethering that chronicle would take literally no time at all, since the lying scumbags of the Right have a combined history of absolutely no support of any kind at any time for veterans' affairs.

It's as if right-wingers hate veterans worse than the enemies those veterans had been sent into combat to protect us from.

For a country that has allowed warmongering to be stitched into the center of its psyche, one of the strangest phenomena is the depth of contempt and loathing our warmongering party has shown toward the Americans who are sent off to fight those wars.

Right-wingers love war. They worship war. You get the feeling it's what they do instead of sex, at least when there are no abusable friends or family, or hookers, or dishy callboys readily available and they would otherwise have to satisfy themselves with their vast reserves of porn. (What would right-wingers do without their vast reserves of porn?)

BUT RIGHT-WINGERS DON'T LOVE THE PEOPLE
THEY SEND SO JOYFULLY TO FIGHT THEIR WARS

There's never any limit to how much money the right-wing psychotic lying scumbags are prepared to spend on war -- on budget, off budget, around budget. And the mantra is always "Support Our Troops." You can be tarred and feathered for Not Supporting Our Troops. We sure heard plenty of that during the Bush regime's orgy or warmaking.

But of course the right-wing psychotic lying scumbags never give a damn about Supporting Our Troops, only about Supporting Our Wars. Do we really not remember how ineptly armed, or even unarmed, Our Troops were sent into Iraq? Even though a war in Iraq was clearly at or near the top of the agenda of everyone in the Bush regime who had input into the making of foreign policy.

And when those Not Supported Troops, having lacked the good grace to die, are turned from troops into veterans, then they become the warmongers' enemy.

Parlly, of course, it's about money, and the role of government, which is basically to provide right-wing scumbags with the opportunity to steal as much of it as they can lay their grubby paws on -- and of course to provide the money itself for them to hijack.

And when right-wing psychotic lying scumbags get on their Gov't Is the Enemy mechanical horse, intoning that Gov't Spending Is Wasteful Spending, then of course it's the rest of us who have to live with the consequences. Whenever Congress was called on to provide adequate financial support for veterans' care, it was the right-wing psychotic lying scumbags who led the shrieking chorus of "Chuck you, Farley."

And when right-wing psychotic lying scumbags inflected mandatory automatic spending cuts, and a government shutdown, pretending in the depths of their devoid-of-realtiy delusions that these idiotic, dangerous actions in fact had no consequences, how were they allowed to sustain those vicious delusions?

Yesterday on the radio I heard one of the psychotic lying scumbags intoning -- in that mandatory tone of high dudgeon and high outrage -- about how it's not about politics or lack of public support and I assumed the earth must surely have promptly opened up and swallowed the slimepod, because as anyone with a working brain has known all through the scandals, those are the only things it has been about.

It's the right-wing psychotic lying scumbags who caused the crisis, and naturally they lie about it. Well, what would you expect them to do?

I had to flash back to one of those daily regurgitaions of imbecilic lying filth puked up by washingtonpost.com's one-note pyscho, TheJennifer Rubin, who is she were an actual person would be a lock for Dumbest, Most Corrupt Pile of Fake-Journalistic Puke on the Planet5. The Jennifer Rubin has apparently no other component in its machine"brain" than about 12 brain cells, which screech, "Obama did it." To judge by its "writing," you'd have to guess that The Jennifer Rubin was created to inhabit a world where there is no reality -- just the obsessive screeching of brain-dead propaganda screaming that everything bad in the entire course of the history of the universe -- all 6000 years of it -- is owing to Obama's socialism and corruption. I hope I don't have to add "Obama" is a code word for . . . well, you know the basic things it's a code word for.

Just a day or two ago I noticed The Jennifer Rubin frothing about how, predictably, the New York Times had taken potshots at George W. Bush, as if this were the most outrageous thing A Jennifer Rubin could imagine -- and possibly it is. The reality, of course, is that it would be impossible ever to take enough "pot shots" at that vile desecrator of human decency, at least until the day when everyone who worked for the Bush regime is safely imprisoned and the leaders have been executed. If Chimpy had been judged by the standards applied by the psychotic lying scumbags of the Right to Obama, he would by now have been executed about a million billion times.

Oh yes, The Jennifer Rubin and the VA scandals. Wasn't it about the VA Scandals that TJR was screeching a week or two ago about the apocalyptic dastardliness of it, and it doesn't matter whether you're a liberal or conservative, blah-blah-blah. As if TJR was mechanically capble of separating anything from ideology, from expressing anything that isn't filtered through rightwing psychotic lying scumbagger. She has no other subject, no other resource, no other reason for getting out of her storage unit every day to puke up more imbecilic filth.

ONE THING THE VA "SCANDALS" CERTAINLY
HAVEN'T BEEN ABOUT IS VETS' MEDICAL CARE

Because those same psychotic lying scumbags have consistently done everything in their power to make sure it sucks, possibly because any pennies devoted to care for veterans are pennies that won't be availale to send more of our "heroes" into the next insane adventure the psychotic lying scumbag warmongers want to send them into to be killed and maimed.

And yet the right-wing psychotic lying scumbags get away with pretending that, when ti comes to veterans' care, they are the solution rather than the problem.

16 Democrats Ready To Join Republicans In Selling Out American National Interests

Who's afraid of AIPAC? Apparently a shitload of craven Democrats in the U.S. Senate. So far 59 senators have signed on as co-sponsors of legislation that was ostensibly written by 2 non-Jewish AIPAC shills, Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) but initiated by Joe Lieberman and Israel's far right Likud Party and clearly meant to torpedo the peace process. Senators of questionable loyalty to America in matters regarding Israel-- including 16 AIPAC-owned Democrats, particularly Menendez, Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Ben Cardin, Michael Bennet, Bob Casey, Mark Begich, Kay Hagan, Mark Pryor, Chris Coons, Mary Landrieu, Mark Warner, and, of course, Joe Donnelly and Joe Manchin.

Maybe they remember how AIPAC, whose first loyalty is always to Israel and never to America, systematically set about to destroy the careers of patriotic American congressmembers Earl Hilliard (D-AL) in 2001 and Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) when they tried to remind people that Israel isn't the 51st state. In 2002 AIPAC and its big-spending allies knocked out Hilliard in a primary run-off with conservative corporate whore Artur Davis and the same year they engineered the defeat of McKinney in a primary battle with AIPAC lackey Denise Majette, marshaling a big Republican crossover vote.

As USAToday opined Monday in an editorial against the Menendez-Kirk legislation, the bill "would almost surely torpedo the peace bid" and "dictates terms of the final agreement-- specifically, that Iran must halt not just its nuclear weapons program but rather stop all enrichment of uranium, including any used for nuclear power."

That is precisely the issue that makes the negotiations extraordinarily delicate. Iran is so publicly committed to its right to enrich that its negotiators could not give in to such a dictate even if they want to.

Nor does the bill stop there. It expresses "the sense of Congress" that if Israel decides to attack Iran, the United States should provide military support. The provision doesn't quite outsource American war decisions to Israel; Congress would still need a second vote to turn its dubious "sense" into action. But the implication is hard to miss.

The bill is useful only if held in reserve. The fact that it has so many sponsors is sufficient to deliver the message to Iran. Passing it, on the other hand, virtually guarantees an end to negotiations and a quick path to war. The Iranians are already committed to walking out if the bill passes, despite President Obama's promise of a veto, and they appear to be within months of a nuclear capability that both Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have said that they will not allow.

There is only one sensible strategy. Everyone on the U.S. side agrees that success requires the credible dismantling of Iran's nuclear program. And no one, including Secretary of State John Kerry, believes that objective can be easily attained.

What's missing is agreement on the definition of credible dismantling. That is best left to the negotiators, and judged at the end of their work. Congress will still have its say then. For now, Congress would better serve the country-- and those who would fight the war that its hawks invite-- by rattling its sabers rather than plunging them into the negotiators' hearts.

Steny Hoyer, long one of the House's worst and most contemptible AIPAC shills, attacked President Obama Tuesday for his efforts to prevent war with Iran. Leaders against this abomination in the Senate have been Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Murphy seems to have persuaded his Connecticut colleague, Richard Blumenthal to rethink his support and back away from the toxic bill. John Bollinger, the progressive candidate for the Montana U.S. Senate seat Max Baucus is giving up sent this video to his supporters yesterday:



Later he told me that "We need to give peace a chance to work. Of course, Washington, DC politics are tilted toward war. But after more than a dozen years of war, we should be war weary. If I were in the US Senate, I would fight against the push for increased sanctions to derail the disarmament framework… It's time to bring our troops home. Our modern military can deploy to any hotspot on the globe in 72 hours, we don't need troops deployed to 150 countries. It's time to rebuild America. We can't afford to rebuild America if we go on another military adventure in the Middle East. We need US Senators who will give diplomacy a chance to succeed, not repeat the same mistakes again. America is ready for a peace dividend."

And even self-proclaimed hawks see the Menendez-Kirk legislation as counterproductive. No one would argue that Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the Bush-era shills who helped lie the public into war with Iraq, is anything but a bloodthirsty warmonger. Yesterday he penned an OpEd opposing their bill.

For years, Iran hawks have argued that only punishing sanctions, combined with the threat of military force, would bring Tehran to the nuclear negotiating table. Finally, Iran is at the table. And for reasons that are alternately inexplicable, presumptuous and bellicose, Iran hawks have decided that now is the moment to slap additional sanctions on the Iranian regime.

The bill before the U.S. Senate, which has 59 co-sponsors at last count, will not achieve the denuclearization of Iran. It will not lead to the defunding of Hezbollah by Iran or to the withdrawal of Iranian support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. What it could do is move the U.S. closer to war with Iran and, crucially, make Iran appear-- even to many of the U.S.'s allies-- to be the victim of American intransigence, even aggression. It would be quite an achievement to allow Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, to play the role of injured party in this drama. But the Senate is poised to do just that.

…The most dangerous consequence of these Senate sanctions would manifest itself in places such as Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul and New Delhi. In order to work, sanctions must have the support of the world’s main industrial powers. If countries such as China and India decide that the U.S. is making a concerted attempt to subvert negotiations, their enthusiasm for sanctions will wane dramatically.

The time may come when additional sanctions are necessary-- say, after six months of fruitless negotiations (six months, it should be noted, during which Iran will be closely monitored to ensure that it has kept its nuclear program frozen). At a certain point, two or three months from now, it may become obvious that the talks are destined to fail, at which point more sanctions would be appropriate. But for now, new sanctions, just as negotiations are starting, would be provocative and escalatory and would undermine the administration’s attempt to denuclearize Iran without going to war.

War With Syria Scheduled For Next Week?

Eliot Engel never has America's best interests at heart

Alexei Pushkov, Chairman of the Russian Duma's International Affairs Committee (imagine a cross between Cold Warriors Bob Menendez and Ed Royce), claims, with some justification, that Obama, who he claims is just a Bush clone, is moving the U.S. inexorably towards an illegitimate war with Russia's ally, Syria. He tweeted it:

If you don't read the Cyrillic alphabet: "Obama neuderzhimo idet k voyne v Sirii, kak Bush shel k voyne v Irake.Kak i v Irake, eta voyna ne budet legitimnoy, a Obama stanet klonom Busha." I ran it though Google's translation app and wound up with a garbled but understandable version-- "Obama uncontrollably goes to war in Syria, as Bush went to war in Irake.Kak in Iraq, the war is not legitimate, and Obama becomes a clone of Bush"-- of a strong message warning about U.S. warmongering in the Middle East again.

The remarks came after US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said earlier in the day that the US military was ready to take action against Syria if President Obama gives the green-light.

"President Obama has asked the Defense Department to prepare options for all contingencies. We have done that and we are prepared to exercise whatever option-- if he decides to employ one of those options,” Hagel said.

On August 21, the head of the so-called opposition Syrian National Coalition, George Sabra, claimed that 1,300 people were killed in a government chemical attack on militant strongholds in Damascus suburbs of Ain Tarma, Zamalka and Jobar.

The Syrian government, however, has vehemently rejected the allegations, saying the foreign-backed militants had carried out the attack.

On Saturday, the Syrian forces found chemical agents in tunnels dug by the militants in Jobar. A number of soldiers were suffocated as they entered the area.

On March 19, 2003, US-led forces invaded Iraq under the pretext of wiping out the stocks of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) belonging to the executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime. However, no such weapons were ever discovered in the country.

And Pushkov isn't the only observer who feels the U.S. has been looking for an excuse to bomb Syria-- obviously exactly what the neoCons and Israel's right-wing government want-- all along. David Atkins meditated earlier today on McCain's role and McCain, along with his snarling sidekick, Lindsey Graham, have only been the loudest in the chorus of American warmongers and AIPAC stooges banging the drums of war.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Bob Corker (R-TN) was on Fox News Sunday this morning banging the same drum. "This is not something where opposition forces have contrived something," he declared, alluding to the sloppy way Bush and Cheney lied their way into an attack against Iraq. "I hope the president, as soon as we get back to Washington will ask for authorization from Congress to do something in a very surgical and proportional way." The Likud agent, Eliot Engel (D-NY), who the Democrats decided to make the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was even worse than Corker, claiming Obama shouldn't have to ask Congress before bombing Syria. Parroting the AIPAC line he always parrots, Engel said "I just think that we have to move and we have to move quickly. I do agree with Senator Corker that Congress needs to be involved but perhaps not initially. Perhaps the president could start and then Congress needs to resolve it and ascend to it." Maybe Engel should have familiarized himself with the War Powers Act and the Constitution before being given a position so far above his level of competence.

Short version of what happened today: probably under pressure from Russia, Assad agreed to allow UN Arms inspectors and scientists examine the areas around Damascus where there have been claims of a massive poison gas attack, which is what the U.S. has been demanding all week. As soon as Assad agreed, the U.S. said it was too late and they don't care about inspections any longer.

The Obama administration said Sunday it believed Syria used chemical weapons in an offensive last week around Damascus and rebuffed the Assad regime's offer to provide U.N. inspectors access to the affected areas, saying the move came too late to be credible.

The comments by a senior administration official signaled that the White House wasn't backing away from a showdown despite apparent efforts by Damascus to ease tensions by allowing United Nations inspectors to visit the areas allegedly hit with chemical weapons.

"If the Syrian government had nothing to hide and wanted to prove to the world that it had not used chemical weapons in this incident, it would have ceased its attacks on the area and granted immediate access to the U.N. five days ago," a senior Obama administration official said.

"At this juncture, the belated decision by the regime to grant access to the U.N. team is too late to be credible, including because the evidence available has been significantly corrupted as a result of the regime's persistent shelling and other intentional actions over the last five days," the official added.

The official said that-- based on the reported number of victims, the reported symptoms of those who were killed or injured and other information-- "there is very little doubt at this point that a chemical weapon was used by the Syrian regime against civilians in this incident."

The official said President Barack Obama is still assessing how to respond to "this indiscriminate use of chemical weapons."

The Pentagon has prepared military options for the White House that include cruise missile strikes on regime targets, officials said.

U.S. intelligence agencies are still investigating last week's incident, and could present a final assessment to Mr. Obama within days.

Earlier the U.N. said its inspection team was preparing to start its fact-finding mission on Monday after Syria said it would allow U.N. inspectors currently in Damascus immediate access to areas around the capital where the opposition accused the regime of using chemical weapons against fighters and civilians five days ago.

A presenter on Syrian state television, reading a statement attributed to an unnamed official at the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said agreement was reached following a meeting between Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem and Angela Kane, the U.N. disarmament chief, who arrived in Damascus on Saturday.

Lost in all the clamouring for war is the fact that no one really knows who used the chemical weapons. The Obama Administration doesn't seem to want to let that stand in the war of bombing Syria. Did they learn nothing from Bush's Iraq fiasco? The American people seem to have. The vast majority are not ready to follow Obama into any wars against Syria (and its allies).

Americans strongly oppose U.S. intervention in Syria's civil war and believe Washington should stay out of the conflict even if reports that Syria's government used deadly chemicals to attack civilians are confirmed, a Reuters/Ipsos poll says.

About 60 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should not intervene in Syria's civil war, while just 9 percent thought President Barack Obama should act.

More Americans would back intervention if it is established that chemical weapons have been used, but even that support has dipped in recent days-- just as Syria's civil war has escalated and the images of hundreds of civilians allegedly killed by chemicals appeared on television screens and the Internet.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll, taken August 19-23, found that 25 percent of Americans would support U.S. intervention if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces used chemicals to attack civilians, while 46 percent would oppose it. That represented a decline in backing for U.S. action since August 13, when Reuters/Ipsos tracking polls found that 30.2 percent of Americans supported intervention in Syria if chemicals had been used, while 41.6 percent did not.

Two different faces of the Republican Party on this, one utterly insane and one we should all be paying attention to and supporting:

IS McCAIN REALLY AN UNREPENTANT WARMONGER?

Will anyone dare to bring up the sanity question?

Ask anyone in Washington who the biggest publicity whore is in Congress and you always get the same answer: John McCain. He has cultivated the press like no other member of either house. And today one of his more pathetic sycophants, Matt Bai, authored a mega-puff piece that McCain must have been drooling over-- until the throw away line at the end of the third paragraph:

More recently, McCain has found himself on the opposite side of Webb and Hagel again, this time over their “G.I. bill” that would offer education money to every returning veteran. McCain and others want a more limited bill that would encourage rank-and-file soldiers to re-enlist rather than return to civilian life.

McCain has been shrewd, and largely successful in portraying himself as a friend of the military. A careful examination of his voting record shows that he is a friend to the Pentagon, a friend to the military contractors, mercenary companies, and to the war profiteers but never a friend-- not when moves beyond running his fat mouth-- to the regular fighting men or to the military vets. Currently McCain's credibility with military families has strained to the breaking point because of his vow to sabotage the bipartisan GI Bill introduced by fighting (rather than imprisoned) war heroes Jim Webb (D-VA) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and passed overwhelmingly in the House last week.

Back to Bai. He misses the entire point of why McCain is the Senate's most unhinged and dangerous war-monger. He almost gets it; I mean he has the facts. He just doesn't have what it takes to put them together.
When it comes to McCain and all the other Vietnam War vets in the Senate, only McCain is an unabashed cheerleader for Bush's disastrous war, one he is eager to make his own... and expand exponentially. "I know war," he blusters to Bai, as he blusters to everyone who has ever interviewed him, "and I know the tragedy of war. And no one hates war more than veterans.”

Among his fellow combat veterans in the Senate, past and present, he is the only one who has continued to champion the war in Iraq; by contrast, Kerry, Webb and Hagel have emerged in the years since the invasion as unsparing critics of American involvement there. (In a new book, Hagel, who voiced deep concerns about Iraq even as he voted for the war resolution in 2002, predicts that the war will turn out to be “the most dangerous and costly foreign-policy debacle in our nation’s history.”) This divide among old allies may be the inevitable result of a protracted war that has cleaved plenty of American households and friendships. But it may also be that the war is revealing underlying fractures among the Senate’s Vietnam coalition.

There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.

Not all of McCain’s fellow veterans subscribe to the theory that the singularity of his war experience has anything to do with his intransigence on Iraq. (Bob Kerrey, for one, told me that while he was aware of this argument, he has never believed it.) But some suspect that whatever lesson McCain took away from his time in Vietnam, it was not the one that stayed with his colleagues who were “in country” during those years — that some wars simply can’t be won on the battlefield, no matter how long you fight them, no matter how many soldiers you send there to die.

“McCain is my friend and brother, and I love him dearly,” Max Cleland, Georgia’s former Democratic senator, told me when we talked last month. “But I think you learn something fighting on the ground, like me and John Kerry and Chuck Hagel did in Vietnam. This objective of ‘hearts and minds’? Well, hello! You didn’t know which heart and mind was going to blow you up!

“I have seen this movie before, and I know how it ends,” says Cleland, who lost three of his limbs to an errant grenade during the battle of Khe Sanh. “With thousands dead and tens of thousands more injured, and years later you ask yourself what you were doing there. To the extent my friend John McCain signs on to this, he is endangering America’s long-term interests, and probably his own election in the fall.”

So what is it that Bai is missing? The bitterness and frustration of an ego-obsessed hot dog-- an elderly but tragically immature one-- whose incarceration, something he was once ashamed of but has turned into his calling card, never allowed him to get the blood lust out of his system. And now, as he smells his own mortality, he senses the opportunity. Back in 2000 when he was battling Bush for the GOP presidential nomination, Bush was calling for a more humble foreign policy while McCain's bellicose attitude was all about "rogue-state rollback" and taking hostile action against Iraq, Iran and North Korea. That's when he threw his lot in with the most demented, naive and least trustworthy bunch in U.S. politics, the neocons. McCain was another right-wing pol taken in by Iranian double agent Ahmed Chalabi.

By the time Bai gets into his interview with McCain, it is clear-- although maybe not to Bai-- that McCain is so far gone that he should be wearing a bib and being kept away from sharp objects lest he hurt himself. Out of nowhere he starts carrying on about how wanted war criminal Henry Kissinger is his most trusted foreign policy adviser and how he isn't a hawk. Bai is moved to mention that the campaign could "become a referendum on whether he was stable and rational enough to be trusted with the nation’s nuclear codes." How could it not? He's a confused old man who should be thinking about presiding over birthday parties for his grandchildren, not over the National Security Council. "It’s hard to know who the Janjaweed is," he tells Bai as he contemplates invading Sudan, "who are the killers, who are the victims. It’s all jumbled up." Yes it is... time for a nice nappy... although he insisted, albeit wistfully, on expanding his list of who to invade to include Myanmar.

“It goes back to the Vietnam thing,” McCain told me. “I’m just not sure the American people would support a military engagement in Burma, no matter how justified the cause. And I can’t tell you exactly when it would be over. And I can’t tell you exactly what the reaction of the people there would be.”

Most American politicians, of course, would immediately dismiss the idea of sending the military into Zimbabwe or Myanmar as tangential to American interests and therefore impossible to justify. McCain didn’t make this argument. He seemed to start from a default position that moral reasons alone could justify the use of American force, and from there he considered the reasons it might not be feasible to do so. In other words, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, while most politicians looked at injustice in a foreign land and asked, “Why intervene?” McCain seemed to look at that same injustice and ask himself, “Why not?”

And one thing he will never ask "why not?" about is ending the occupation of Iraq. In McCainWorld, that war never ends. Bai is sympathetic and forgiving of all of McCain's unattractive traits. "We made a mess in Iraq, he says, but it’s our mess now, and we have to stay on and fix it."


UPDATE: McCAIN BACKS BUSH AGAINST MILITARY VETS... AGAIN

Senator Jim Webb explained it on Meet The Press today. If Bush vetoes the bipartisan GI Bill he will be the first president in the history of our country to veto benefits for military vets. And his two biggest enablers on this-- Mitch McConnell and John McCain.

IS McCAIN'S FOREIGN POLICY AGENDA EVEN WORSE THAN HIS DOMESTIC AGENDA?

I love it that people have been digging some of the posts here at DWT. One steady digger, Harry, has gotten very pushy lately though. He's always asking when the next post is going up and demanding more, more, more. After I posted on McCain's blatant hypocrisy on fiscal matters, Harry demanded a companion piece on McCain's even more dangerous stance on foreign affairs.

Ken and I have been posting about the dangers of McCain's warmongering and his truculent schoolboy bully attitude towards other countries. After 8 years of Bush and Cheney, it's the last thing America needs! When Bush was running for President in 2000 he laid out a "humble foreign policy" to the voters. Please take a look at him explaining it then:



After he started attacking countries, breaking treaties and making outrageous demands on (small) sovereign nations, he explained that 9/11 changed everything. Yet, reading Against The Tide by Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee paints a very, very different picture. Exactly one day after the Supreme Court made Bush president, Cheney came striding over to the Senate for a meeting with the Republican moderate caucus. Keep in mind that half a dozen far right GOP senators had been defeated and that the Senate was evenly split 50 Democrats to 50 Republicans. Chafee felt that Cheney was coming over to meet with the moderates about getting a centrist consensus together. Was he wrong!

In steady, quiet tones, the Vice President-elect laid out a shockingly divisive political agenda for the new Bush administration, glossing over nearly every pledge the Republican ticket had made to the American voter. President-elect Bush had promised that healing, but now we moderate Republicans were hearing Richard Cheney articulate the real agenda: A clashist approach on every issue, big and small, and any attempt at consensus would be a sign of weakness. We would seek confrontation on every front. He said nothing about education or the environment or health care; it was all about these new issues that were rarely, if ever, touted in the campaign. The new administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us. I knew that what the Vice President-elect was saying would rip the closely divided Congress apart. We moderates had often voted with President Clinton on things that powerful Republican constituencies didn't like: an increase in the minimum wage, a patients' bill of rights, and campaign finance reform. Mr. Cheney knew this, but he ticked off the issues at the top of his agenda and did it fearlessly. It made no difference to him that we were potential adversaries; he was going down his to-do list and checking off Confrontation Number 1.

More than anything else, Cheney and his treasonous cabal of future war criminals wanted to attack Iraq. And they were going to do it by hook or by crook. McCain is doing his best to lull Americans into believing he's the Bush they fell for in 2000 instead of the Cheney they got the day after the election. Can't be fooled again? We'll see. The new issue of Newsweek takes measure of McCain's foreign policy pronouncements and paints a picture that makes Cheney look almost moderate! And sane. You see, Cheney and Bush just wanted to attack small, weak countries that couldn't defend themselves. McCain wants to play tough with real countries-- ones that can and will fight back... like Iran, Russia and China.

On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.

In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil-- but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.

We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous-- that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.

...The neoconservative vision within the speech is essentially an affirmation of ideology. Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies. It proposes a League of Democracies, which would presumably play the role that the United Nations now does, except that all nondemocracies would be cast outside the pale. The approach lacks any strategic framework. What would be the gain from so alienating two great powers? How would the League of Democracies fight terrorism while excluding countries like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Singapore? What would be the gain to the average American to lessen our influence with Saudi Arabia, the central banker of oil, in a world in which we are still crucially dependent on that energy source?

The single most important security problem that the United States faces is securing loose nuclear materials. A terrorist group can pose an existential threat to the global order only by getting hold of such material. We also have an interest in stopping proliferation, particularly by rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea. To achieve both of these core objectives-- which would make American safe and the world more secure-- we need Russian cooperation. How fulsome is that likely to be if we gratuitously initiate hostilities with Moscow? Dissing dictators might make for a stirring speech, but ordinary Americans will have to live with the complications after the applause dies down.

To reorder the G8 without China would be particularly bizarre. The G8 was created to help coordinate problems of the emerging global economy. Every day these problems multiply-- involving trade, pollution, currencies-- and are in greater need of coordination. To have a body that attempts to do this but excludes the world's second largest economy is to condemn it to failure and irrelevance. International groups are not cheerleading bodies but exist to help solve pressing global crises. Excluding countries won't make the problems go away.

McCain appears to think that he can magically unite the two main strands in the Republican foreign-policy establishment. But he can't. This is not about personalities but about two philosophically divergent views of international affairs. Put together, they will produce infighting and incoherence. We have seen this movie before. We have watched an American president unable to choose between his ideologically driven vice president and his pragmatic secretary of State-- and the result was the catastrophe of George W. Bush's first term. Twenty-five years earlier, we watched another president who believed that he could encompass the entire spectrum of foreign policy. He, too, gave speeches that were drafted by advisers with divergent world views: in that case, Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski. It led to the paralyzing internal battles of the Carter years. Does John McCain want to try this experiment one more time?

A more important question one might ask is if the American people want to try this experiment one more time with John McCain instead of Bush and Cheney.

Now that a working majority of Connecticut voters see Holy Joe Lieberman for the lying swine he is, the trick is to get these messages across IN TIME

"The public can see the truth, whether it is the truth about Lieberman or any other corrupt warmonger in any other part of the country. That reality should encourage us all in our ongoing work to get the truth out."
--David Sirota, in a new blog post, "Another Poll Shows Public Sees Lieberman's Lies"

Say, didja hear where Connecticut's finest (not!), Sen. Holy Joe Lieberman, is ticked off at being accused of warmongering just because of that resolution laying the grounds for war on Iran which he and that other peerless prince of peace Arizona Sen. John Kyl shoved through the Senate? No, no, His Holiness pules! Dontcha see, we're trying to prevent war!

Unfortunately for the Ghostly One, it's getting harder for him to fool anyone with:

(a) an IQ in the double digits or higher, and

(b) a shred of honesty.

Have you noticed how quickly these days serial Democratic turncoats--like California's Senator DiFi--are branded "the new Lieberman"? And everyone knows what it means. (And there sure are a bunch of 'em.)

For many months now we've heard rumblings from Connecticut that significant numbers of the Lying Likudnik's constituents have caught on to the fact that during last fall's general election campaign they were hoodwinked by the shameless one's unremitting barrage of outright, bare-faced, utterly unapologetic whoppers.

Last night David Sirota posted this blog entry:

Another Poll Shows Public Sees Lieberman's Lies

Back in September, Kos commissioned a nonpartisan poll that found that if Lieberman-Lamont election were held again, Lamont would win. In a post about Kos's poll, I cross-referenced the poll with our internal poll numbers from the campaign, showing how the voters who would change their votes are those who realized Lieberman lied when he promised voters he would help end the war if they reelected him. Now, a Quinnipiac University poll confirms that Connecticut voters have woken up to Lieberman's dishonesty.

Here are the key results, as reported by the Connecticut Post:

Among the 52 percent of those polled who said they voted for Lieberman in 2006, 78 percent said they would vote for him again today if given the chance, and 15 percent would switch to another candidate.

Among those who would switch, 58 percent cited his stand on the Iraq war while 41 percent said they would switch for different reasons.

As a whole, 61 percent disagree with Lieberman's position strongly supporting the war in Iraq. Meanwhile, 71 percent said they disapprove of the way President Bush is handling Iraq.

By my math, 78 percent of 52 percent is just 40 percent - pretty damn abysmal for a sitting U.S. Senator. Most of that 15 percent attrition would likely go to Lamont, of course, meaning Ned would have won in a landslide.

Why mention any of this? Because it is just another reminder of the value of educating the public on the issues. Lieberman won for no other reason than the fact that he successfully tricked a public that desperately wanted to believe he opposed the war they hated. It was very difficult to break through his lies - but it is nonetheless encouraging to know that in just a year since the election, the public has seen the truth. It means the public can see the truth, whether it is the truth about Lieberman or any other corrupt warmonger in any other part of the country. That reality should encourage us all in our ongoing work to get the truth out.

As he usually does, I think David's got the angle on this exactly right. It's too late to rerun the Connecticut Senate race. But rumor has it that there are some other elections coming up in the next year, starting with rounds of primaries at all levels.

As we've learned repeatedly, especially in the years of the Bush regime, it's often difficult "to get the truth out." There are powerful forces arrayed against it. (I'm not sure that Cheney, Bush, and their cronies have perpetrated any single more lastingly harmful outrage than their deadly assault on the very concept of truth.) But the very terror those forces feel in the face of the truth underscores the importance of getting it out.

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