What will Washington do when they realize no one believes their bullshit excuses for war?

Syria may or may not have used chemical weapons, but people aren't buying that that's a good enough reason to bomb the crap out of them, and probably a large percentage know that is not even remotely why our government would do so anyway.

When the reality that their schtick isn't working seeps into that bubble of hubris and bought and paid for conviction in Washington, what will they do?

This moment in history is reminding me of Rush Limbaugh calling that college girl a slut. He had done far worse in the past, but somehow, that was the event that triggered his undoing.

This planned Syria attack may not be the worst, most reckless, or criminal thing our government has done, but it may be the hit and run that makes us finally take away their foreign policy car keys.

WHITE HOUSE PETITION: US had no moral authority to punish Syria's war crimes while our own...

I hope I didn't leave anything out.

Obama sends Bush to teach Syria how to kill civilians legally

Obama sends Bush to teach Syria how to kill civilians legally



In a last ditch effort to avoid air strikes and cruise missile attacks on Syria, President Barack Obama has deployed former President George W Bush as a special envoy to instruct Syrian President Bashir Assad on the how to kill civilians without committing war crimes.

"No one alive knows more about this than former President Bush," Obama said. "He has by some estimates, authorized the killing of over a million Iraqi men, women, and children and untold tens of thousands of Afghans--all without committing war crimes or human rights violations. That's why I gave him immunity for actions taken in those wars just the other day."

Bush had already arrived in Syria and begun what he called his "Cheneying" of the young president of Syria.

He took a brief break to explain the advice he's giving Assad in an exclusive interview with Fox News.

"See, first thing I told him is we're the deciders. We decide what's the right way to kill terrorists. And that's the first step. Only kill terrorists. And they can come in any gender or age or sexual oriented minority."

FULL TEXT

POLL: How honest is the case for war with Syria?

After Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and the ongoing war drums against Iran that fits Gen. Wesley Clark's Bush era story of another general showing him a memo with a list of countries to attack or target for regime change, which Obama has pretty much continued to check off by slightly more understated means than Bush.

Conservatives talked of a unipolar moment when we have a brief period to reset the table and clear out middle weight regimes that aren't cooperative with our economic order before a new superpower arises and we are constrained as we were during the Cold War.

And of course the case for the Iraq War was not a matter of mistaken intelligence, but cherry-picking, ignoring analysts, and outright lying.

In that context, how honest do you think the case for attacking Syria is?

How can we get a progressive presidential candidate at the top of Democratic ticket in 2016?

Obama has been good on a few issues, but for the most part, when Wall Street says, jump, Obama says how high, particularly on issues where he couldn't blame GOP coercion, like the repetitive standardized testing to prove public schools are failing as an excuse to replace them with for profit charter schools that get taxpayer money but do worse more often than better for students.

Or foreign policy that mostly differs from Bush in style rather than substance.

Or not prosecuting any of the big fish on Wall Street who broke the world economy with intentional fraud.

Or picking the same guys who deregulated banks to run his economic policy,

and so on.

Any Democrat will be better than the GOP, but the problem is, the leaders of the Democratic Party try to keep as little daylight as possible between them and Republicans on a host of issues, especially when someone is greasing their palm to do so.

How can we pull the party back toward FDR and away from Rubin/Summers?

What would our government do if Syria killed over a thousand civilians with white phosphorus or

depleted uranium?

Or just plain cluster bombs or helicopter gunships shooting at reporters and kids?

How about if he just killed a million people in a country on the other side of the world instead of a few thousand in his own country?

Would we still be figuring out "military options" to end his atrocities?

WHITE HOUSE PETITION: fully pardon Bradley Manning

There probably are and will be more of these various places, but posting one on the White House website makes it harder for them to say haven't seen it, and for others who stumble across it on their site, it will be like a scarlet letter.

Who knows, it might even force Obama to act.

Sign at the link:

http://wh.gov/lg7Lo

What would you like to see Wikileaks, Snowden, Anonymous or others leak most?

This is inspired by Robert Parry's piece that the Bradley Manning leaks may have prevented a war with Iran.

Way up on my list is the part of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 that Bush censored that deal with the Saudi government role in 9/11.

Sen. Bob Graham, chair of the Senate Intel Committee at the time of 9/11 said if the public saw those pages, it would change our relationship with Saudi overnight.

He and former Sen. Bob Kerrey are pursuing evidence of Saudi involvement on their own, presumably to find independent evidence that they can present without revealing what they know from classified sources.

I would also like to see the emails between Wall Street and both the Bush and Obama White Houses during and after the 2008 collapse, so we can see exactly who was calling the shots, and what they expected to get out of it.

And I would like to see the real arguments for the Iraq War and which players in the business world were lobbying for that (so we can possibly present them with a bill for our services).

Any others?

Should DU have a GOSSIP and personal attack about public figures forum?

Given the MANY personal attack posts about Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and in the past other progressives that annoy Republicans and corporate Democrats' masters, as well as the largely irrelevant self-inflicted wounds of pols like Anthony "Look at My" Wiener, should DU have a gossip and personal attack forum?

That would mean locking or deleting such threads in other forums, and telling the poster to take it to its assigned dungeon.

I think there should still be room in General Discussion and the other big forums for issues of hypocrisy like which pols talk a good game while taking money from corporations, back the drug war after (or while) partaking themselves, or the gay-bashers who are closet gays.

And we could make the Gossip forum just for those to the left of Olympia Snowe (though that would not be my choice).

Locking this crap and redirecting it to a Gossip dungeon would clear out a lot of the trash talk and acrimony and recenter DU on actual issues instead making us sound only half an IQ point above the talking heads on TV.

And it would help our corporate friends here to sell their case based on the merits of their arguments on ISSUES rather than by defaming people they don't agree with.

What do you think?
What do

RAVITCH: Why don't corporate ed reformers want public schools to be like best private ones?

What's odd here is that the corporate ed reformers claim that most parents don't want the kind of education for their kids that the president, education secretary, and very wealthy get for their kids.

Why don't they just say that every time they announce these policies: "I want to make money giving your kids an education I would NEVER accept for my own."

At the very least, I wish someone would ask the best private schools in their community how often they do standardized testing.