Pride and Prejudice

Our feelings we with difficulty smother
When constabulary duty's to be done:
Ah, take one consideration with another,
A policeman's lot is not a happy one!

-W.H. Gilbert-

You can't prove a negative, at least that's what the old saw says. I've never wasted  much thought on it but maybe it's time, because we're often required to "prove" to authorities that the cash in our pockets isn't the wages of sin, that we're not trying to break into our own homes, that we aren't inebriated behind the wheel and many other variations on the "who are you?" theme.  How does a woman, for instance, prove to a L.A.P.D. officer that she's not expecting payment for "making out" with her "boyfriend" in his expensive car?  Not by refusing to produce some kind of ID and claiming it's a constitutional offense to ask for it, I would suggest. How many teenagers have been asked for ID by the constabulary in those secluded parking places we used to frequent?   How many times was I stopped either driving or walking, way back in my long hair days?  Sure that's profiling, but is profiling based on behavior forgivable, even necessary?  Isn't it understandable prejudice to suspect the man in the ski mask entering the bank?

It's hard to fault anyone for suspecting that any particular Los Angeles  police officer might be someone prone to prejudice. It's well within the range of possibility, and like many people I tend toward that human proclivity toward prejudice against authority even while I recognize the need for it.  But I do see that sometimes it's impossible to prove one is not prejudiced because in a sense, prejudice is another word for learning from experience. I try not to overuse the accusation. I wonder too if  the policeman's problem of determining who is who and up to what by looking  can be a problem in our brave new world  where everyone tries to dress down as much as possible. At the risk of  hearing the "blame the victim" argument I'll suggest that when everyone looks like a bum, a policeman's lot is not a happy one.

So did the officer suspect the woman sitting in a Mercedes wearing a worn, faded and flimsy tee shirt and trashy shorts of being a prostitute because she was black,  or because she fit the legitimate profile which includes abusively refusing to give a name and address upon official request?  Does it matter?  It does if  you're trying to fit the "incident" into that well worn Procrustean bed of  racism and police conduct. It matters if you're to be accused of  "blaming the victim" which one must never do even if the victim's behavior was part, or even the origin of the problem. 

Interracial couples may no longer be illegal, but they still aren't terribly common. My wife and I still get looks and especially in the South but what seems like racism may only be curiosity.  I grant the benefit of the doubt.   But  one really doesn't see people making out in cars during the day and with a door open. Questions are raised because things do exhibit patterns even if all that quacks is not a duck, all that glisters is not gold and all passionate intimacy is not commercial but sometimes a duck really is a duck. If ducks are illegal, the cop has to ask.

Policemen after all,  are paid to be suspicious and face it, to refuse to identify oneself  upon request is in itself a suspicious act.  My point is that it's common for a cop to ask you who you are and what you're doing and it falls far short of  search and seizure.  "My name is Danielle Watts and I work here at CBS"  may well have been enough to have produced a " thank you miss, sorry to bother you, have a good day" than handcuffs.   Do we have the right to assume the cop was out of  line and is acting so any different than prejudice on our part? 

Yes, that old bill of rights (remember that?) used to require probable cause for a search, and asking for identification may not really be covered by the fourth amendment but even so, the question is moot because in recent years, it doesn't apply within 100 miles of  a border.  Even without the Border Search exemption which allows search without cause for the majority of Americans a policeman asking for identification is hardly a violation of our civil rights even if  he's making a presumption  based on ethnicity or color or hair length or facial tattoos, a ski mask in August or questionable attire, it's not necessarily evidence of some official misconduct or private malice.  Any policeman would probably take my false assertion that I don't need to show identification as a good reason to suspect I had outstanding warrants or was up to no good.  It's like saying "don't look in the trunk - there's nothing in the trunk" at a traffic stop.  It's looking for trouble and being offended when you get it.  Is a deliberate victim really a victim at all?

All roads lead to damnation

At least they do if you're Barack Obama.  Threaten to impeach if he intervenes in Syria or Libya and threaten to impeach if he hasn't.  I keep saying it but now perhaps I don't need to illustrate it. Representative Jack Kingston, R-Ga shouts it from the rooftops the day before yesterday, or at least from the Capitol steps.  Anticipating the presidents speech, and a great one it was, Kingston told reporters it doesn't matter how it goes, 

”It’s an election year. A lot of Democrats don’t know how it would play in their party, and Republicans don’t want to change anything. We like the path we’re on now. We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long.” [italics mine]

There you have it, the Republican strategy in a nutshell or the Republican turd in the punchbowl if you prefer.  Sure some people see these saboteurs and insurrectionists as patriots simply because they hate civilization so much but sorry, I'm not drinking that punch.

9/11

Riding my new bike yesterday, an elderly driver decided that the exit ramp was no longer the place for her and suddenly swerved back into the road  without looking.  It just so happens that's exactly where I was.  I managed to avoid her at some risk of falling, but it happened so fast there was no question of using my horn and she simply continued on her way somewhere at ten under the limit. Why do I mention this?  Because it's 9/11 again, the day of self pity and choreographed mourning and as the fellow on the news this morning said, "I used to feel invincible but now I feel so vulnerable."

Do we need a better example of how erratically, erroneously and stupidly people assess risk?  If we were to make a statistically accurate list ranking the possibility of being harmed by a terrorist attack on any given day, would it be below a list of thousands of possibilities -- tens of thousands -- hundreds of thousands?  But I didn't look over my shoulder in fear and dread getting on the bike on a sunny Wednesday afternoon and I'm not expecting an airplane to crash into my house in rural Florida today either. The chances of getting hurt by some nice old lady just a mile or so from home is almost incalculably larger, yet still small enough that I don't tremble in my steel toe boots thinking about the danger stalking the roads.  Heart attacks, cancer, strokes, a fall in the bathroom, these are all things I legitimately worry about at my age and try to avoid.  Terrorist attacks? Really?  Isn't that an insult to people who wake up every morning in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon? 

But self pity and self absorption are so American.  Beheadings and the other horrors of the day don't count so much unless it's an American head rolling and thousands dead anywhere hardly count in comparison to one possibly unjust American death.

I don't know how much Cola and shoes and Toyotas the obsession of the day will sell on CNN and Fox, but it sells fear by the carload.  It sells so much fear that most of us still haven't noticed that we -- or our congress, that is, signed away the 4th amendment for the great majority of the country, that we began pumping up our police departments with heavy weaponry even in remote places like Wyoming in order to equip them for the hordes of Muslims falling from the sky over the Cheney ranch. It sold domestic surveillance, it sold countless quasi-military weapons. It sold the longest and  most expensive wars in our history. We went to war with an uninvolved country and created so much chaos and so big a power vacuum that Iraq became helpless to keep out Al Qaeda and now ISIS.

But we still feel not only sorry for ourselves, but guilty for not feeling sorry enough.  Eventually 9/11 will go the way of the Alamo, the Maine and Pearl Harbor, but not soon enough for me because as long as we weep and moan and fear to turn our heads lest a fearful beast pursues us, as long as we continue to conduct our petty civil wars,  we won't do a damned thing about the real world and its real troubles.

The Peninsula

In the room, the women come and go

Talking of Michaelangelo

Now is the winter of my discontent made grievously disgusting by the endless moral indignation running from the open tap I call my television. As Richard lamented,  without an enemy to unite against, peace will defeat us, make it impossible for us to live with ourselves, impossible to be part of any good and glorious thing. In fear of  winning, we cultivate and perpetuate outrage.


I flip on CNN just to check the stock market without having to go upstairs where the computer lives, but all I get from the usual sources is a rice storm.  Yes, yes, Ray Rice (I'd never heard of him until he sucker-punched his fiance) is a jerk who should have been punished and probably would sooner have been if his wife had pressed charges instead of marrying him, but apparently his misdeed is symbolic and therefore not to be let go with his having lost a lucrative career in the only thing he knows how to do. He's a symbol of all the men who ever abused a women and carries all their sins.

 Let the witch hunt begin, let the media shitstorm never end (until the next big thing happens) and let's ignore all the things that "alter and illuminate our times" as Walter Cronkite used to say on his long forgotten show You Are There.  No matter what 24/7 news outlet you frequented yesterday you were only where they wanted you to be and for only one purpose:  pump up the outrage, pump up the outrage, pump up the outrage, to paraphrase the song.  The CNN blond bombshell of the day looked apoplectic, slamming her fist on the desk because the NFL hadn't replied to her question the way she wanted, that question being "why didn't you ask for the video from the Royal Casino Hotel?"  The answer that they fully cooperated with authorities in their ongoing investigation isn't an answer because TMZ asked and got material the police didn't release -- or so she says, avoiding the question I would have asked her: why didn't YOU ask for it?  I would have asked her about why we don't hear about the number of  more horrific crimes against women (and men and children) perpetrated at the same time?

Of course we can't ask her nor can we get her to inform us about any of the truly momentous and earth shaking stories that alter and illuminate our times. Things that will go into the history books. We can only go to MSNBC or Headline News or God forbid Fox to hear the same relentless coverage of the same appeals to righteous indignation about the same thing.  The Fox, of course is typically under fire for being typically   dismissive of the charges since the victim married the man rather than sending him to jail, (therefore the is no crime you see) but nothing about the atrocities in Iraq and Syria, the world menace of  militant Islamic extremists, the invasion of Ukraine by a nuke rattling Russia, the danger to Europe the dangers to the world  from anti-science religious and Republican Americans, the impending breakup of the UK,  and all the other events that alter and illuminate our times.

No, all that's important and exclusively so, is that a very rich and apparently violent man punched a woman and dragged her unconscious from an elevator and wasn't punished quickly enough in a world that is spiraling toward mayhem and barbarism and where we're falling further and further behind.

But wait, there's another option right there on my screen -- Al Jazeera.  No, it isn't pro-Muslim, it isn't noticeably biased and it isn't a group of gigglers and snarkers batting their opinions around like Badminton birds -- it's just the news and a hell of  a lot more of it than I'm used to getting.  Yesterday the only news program not chewing on Rice, the only one discussing the relative dangers of ISIS and the Sovereign Citizen movement, even interviewing a proponent of the latter rather than making gross generalizations and offering selected facts and attempting to blame it on Obama.

That, of course,  and the Arabic name as well is enough to make it unwise to cite Al Jazeera in an essay or to bolster an argument in our polarized world of pre-packaged opinion and store-bought personality, but this morning's article about Bullets and Burgers and the American attitude toward guns on their website is the best and most accurate and least biased thing I've yet read on the subject.  

Don't get me wrong, I'm still offering no hope for a bright American future. We will continue to fight like cats in a pillowcase until we're helpless in a world that has no further use for or tolerance of  our stench. Bang? Whimper?  Not really. More likely a lot of screeching about how a thousand dearly beloved causes are being ignored, this faith or that is being offended, this party or the other is ruining the country and trashing its principles and the latest new gollygeewhiz offering from Apple as we fade into self-absorbed irrelevance and oblivion.

My early reaction to Twitter

As I might have mentioned, I recently started playing around with Twitter. Sweet Jesus, it's a unique environment. With only 140 characters to play with, it's like swimming in a crowded whirlpool, and having people grab you, yell something in your ear, and get pulled away by the tide.

I'm noticing some various trends among users. I find a lot of them fall into several categories.

There's the celebrities, of course. People famous for being on TV, or in movies, or writing books or whatever. I've heard that 1% of Twitter users are celebrities, but 99% of the other users follow them. Which might be accurate; I don't know. Some celebrities just tweet about their lives. Others try to use their celebrity to promote the things that are important to them, like causes. Or... instagram filters.

Here's a little fact nobody mentions: if you're looking to get more jokes on your feed, comedians are a weird bunch. Many of them will try out jokes on Twitter, but a lot don't seem to want to "waste" them like that - and, really, that's understandable. When you make your living having people pay to hear your jokes, you don't want to give them away for free.

So sometimes you end up with streams from comedians like Iliza Shlesinger (@iliza), who seems to mostly tweet pictures from her Instagram feed. But most often, you get a lot of tweets like "Had a great time tonight, @HeliumComedy in Philly! Thanks for coming out!" or "I'll be headlining at the #ItchyKitty in Reseda tonight! Be sure to stop by! Tickets at the door!"

There are a lot of people who apparently don't have anything to say. All they do is read their stream, and occasionally retweet ("RT") something somebody else has written. They don't tend to add anything to the discussion. But then, just to keep things exciting, I guess, they'll find somebody who looks interesting and poke through their feed. Then they'll favorite or RT a long string of things from that same person, and then, after that brief flurry of activity, I guess they just go back to grazing through their Twitter stream passively, like bipolar cattle.

Trivia: "starbang" is to favorite a lot of tweets in a row (because the symbol for "favorite" is a star, see?). There's probably a similar term for obsessively retweeting somebody else's words, but I haven't run across it yet.

There's also a weird subclass of Twitter users (or maybe even superusers) that seem to have allowed Twitter to take over their lives. They tend to tweet or retweet constantly, and I'm not entirely clear that they do anything else throughout the day.

I mean, I'll tweet some random, semi-funny line every so often, but these people spew unrelated jokes every 15-20 minutes. And then regurgitate a string of retweets, and then back to spewing their own "humor." I guess it's easier than getting a life...

I'm coming to realize that for a good 99% of users, if you follow them, it's best to just turn off the ability to see their retweets. It's just a good policy.

You know all those mindless idiots who believe everything Fox "News" and Sarah Palin spew? Yeah, a lot of them have Twitter accounts. They can be fun for a while - they tend to block you before too long, though. (I wonder if I've been blocked more often than I've been retweeted? That's an interesting question; somebody's got to have an app that'll show those stats...)

There's also a collection of what must be bots out there - programs that just spew whatever tweets they're designed for. There are "users" who just tweet ads for random ezines (I'm looking at you, funnient.com); I'm starting to suspect that the entire ad department for a lot of these ezines is a Twitter user sending out promos for their latest slideshow.

Also, if you answer somebody with a quote, you'll suddenly find yourself followed by quotebots (everybody from Gandhi to Marilyn Monroe) - it's weird. (Also, some of these things that claim to be quotebots are just adbots. Go figure.

It's a strange world out there. I'm just sayin'...

TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL?

The final chapter to this long twisted story played out in the courts this week and highlights all the reasons why I have had to revise my attitude and views on capital punishment. Someone like Ted Bundy is dispatched to the great (or not so great) beyond and honestly, I'm not all bent out of shape about it. I have always believed that the death penalty may not deter others but at least one bad guy wouldn't be around to slit my throat.
But what do we do about guys like Henry McCollum and Leon Brown? How many have there been in similar situations that didn't get an 11th hour reprieve? The question looms large; how many innocent men and possibly women have been put to death in the US over the years? One is too many for me to continue to support a barbaric system rife with corruption and prejudice.
See Henry McCollum, now 50 and his now 46 year old half brother Leon Brown were convicted of the brutal rape and murder of 11 year old Sabrina Buie in Robeson County, NC back in 1983 when they were 19 and 15 respectively. Both initially received the death penalty but while McCollum's sentence held, Brown's sentence was commuted to life. For over 30 years these two brothers have grown old in prison FOR A CRIME THEY DID NOT COMMIT!
This notorious case has been hard fought for 30 years in the courts, blocking McCollum's execution time and again and good thing because if it had not blocked, he would have received his exonration posthumously.
Recent analysis of a cigarette butt, miraculously preserved all these years, found near Sabrina's body in the field where she died showed the DNA of another man who lived near the killing field, and who is currently serving a life sentence for a similar rape and murder he committed less than a month after Buie's murder!
The defense has long held that these two very scared teens were coerced in to confessing to the crime EVEN THOUGH THERE WAS NO PHYSICAL EVIDENCE LINKING THEM TO THE CRIME!  The brothers finally walked free this week after the judge dismissed all charges.
So now, can you see my dilemma? Can I really believe ever again that justice has been served by the death of a convicted inmate or will the faces of these two brothers, free at last, haunt my thoughts when another conviction makes the news in North Carolina.

Some thoughts on prejudice

 Well, if you told me you were drowning
I would not lend a hand
I've seen your face before my friend
But I don't know if you know who I am
Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin,
I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies

 -Phil Collins-

What is an observation without a frame of reference?  We like to think we can observe facts and make rational deductions, but we can't.  Anyone with training in psychology as it pertains to law enforcement  is likely to tell you that eye witness accounts of the same occurrence will vary markedly and it's been clearly demonstrated that observers concentrating on one thing will be completely unaware of  important people and objects in their direct view.

When I read about an unarmed African American "child" kneeling with his hands up being shot multiple times, I was truly irate, I was ready to write off reports of his just having perpetrated a class B felony and his having charged a policeman who had ordered him to stop as racism. It fits with my habitual beliefs about the police and racism.  I may well have been totally wrong and it may not be the first time, but if it turns out that the 6 foot 4 200 pound "Child" did in fact charge the officer, things might just be other than I was primed to believe.

You might relate it to the halo effect: the tendency to have a view of people and things because of, in this case, his being a member of a traditionally disadvantaged class We do after all read about all sorts of injustice based on race and racism seems to explain a lot. But sometimes, of course we're wrong. Sometimes we fail to see things through the eyes of people who run stores and gas stations in "bad" areas whose lives are in danger every day.  Is it too easy for me  to condemn it from the safety of my gated community and the comfort of my air conditioned office? It depends on your viewpoint, your frame of reference, the things you associate with other things because your human and you have a memory.

For most of my life, I was firmly convinced that Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg were framed.  I galled me that they were Jews and their trial and execution would reflect on me.  I found it easy to find detailed opinions as to their having been innocent. There were lots of people who agreed, lots of signs and protests from lots of convinced people. People I despised were convinced of their guilt. I was ready to see the whole sad affair as yet another example of the persecution of liberals and most of all Jews.  In fact I was passionate about it. I was wrong.

But we see connections between things, relationships, reminders and all the things that lumped together are called bias and prejudice.  Watching the endless coverage of the gruesome and heartbreaking killing of Stephen Sotloff -- the tall dark man with the knife condemning Obama, blaming Obama for what he was about to do and threatening to do it again and again, in the name of peace and freedom  My rage and loathing must surely have been augmented by the years and years of hearing similar rhetoric from Republicans of all sorts, from Fox News to barber shop conversations. It's going to be hard to temper my rage at the endless Obama bashing and ceaseless hatred of human values. These things are inexorably linked in my mind.

And what do we think of Vlad the Invader?  Putin is an arrogant, dishonest, power hungry autocrat, contmptuous of  Democracy, decency, human rights and Liberty. Contemptuous of us. Have you been listening to how Fox and its followers have been praising him as the kind of bold, confident leader American needs?  If you're a Republican you will have forgotten this instantly, but you'll still be contemptuous of Obama and blame him for being weak, for not waving our nuclear penis around. I still remember though and every time I hear you barking about strength, I will associate it with your fascination with tyrants. Evey time you call Obama a tyrant I will remember. Every time I hear you call him weak and indecisiveness, I will associate it with your praise of ruthless aggression.  I will never, ever trust you to tell us the time of day even if my watch confirms it. I know who you are and what you've done and it's all been a pack of lies.

So, yes, I'm human.  Yes, I know there is wisdom and enlightenment in trying to see things through other eyes, but there is discomfort in equal amounts from remembering, from associating or correlating one thing with another. I suffer from rage and closed mindedness and prejudice like everyone else does, so when I see bloody handed monsters I will think of Republicans. When I hear the word "conservative" I think of hate, of tyranny, of  arrogance -- of evil.  the camera can't show it, but I know that face behind the black mask and I see him everywhere.

Aux Etats Sunnis

By (O)CT(O)PUS

Let us recall this quote from the film classic, Lawrence of Arabia:

“So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be 

a little people, a silly people - greedy, barbarous, and cruel …”

Arabs or Americans ... sometimes I wonder which of the two are the little people, the silly people. If anything, Americans are a meddlesome people - provincial, opinionated, arrogant, yet exceptionally ignorant of Middle Eastern culture and history.

How many Americans recall the coup that overthrew Mohammed Moseddegh, the first democratically elected leader of Iran? In 1953, our own CIA aided and abetted the British in toppling a nascent democracy over access to Persian oil. “A cruel and imperialistic country” stealing from a “needy and naked people” were the words spoken by Mosaddegh at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. These words have informed Middle Eastern attitudes for more than half a century.

Does terrorism represent the face of Islam? Not according to the highest religious authority of Saudi Arabia, who said: “Extremist and militant ideas and terrorism which spread decay on Earth, destroying human civilisation, are not in any way part of Islam, but are enemy number one of Islam, and Muslims are their first victims” (The Grand Mufti Sheik Abdulaziz Al al-Sheik).

Not according to the highest religious authority of Egypt, who said: “An extremist and bloody group such as this poses a danger to Islam and Muslims, tarnishing its image as well as shedding blood and spreading corruption” (The Grand Mufti Shawqi Allam).

Not according to the Egyptian military, which overthrew the government of Mohamed Morsi and banned the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. Nor the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, which purged and banished al-Qaeda - whose affiliated groups now operate in remote regions of Yemen and North Africa. Yet, how many Americans pay attention?

Consider the impact of successive Western interventions in the Middle East over time - over oil. European colonialism is partly to blame. As colonial empires crumbled in the aftermath of WWI, European powers gave little thought to the historical schism between the Shiite and Sunni branches of Islam. Britain drew borders around rival ethnic enclaves and formed the modern nation state of Iraq - thus creating a recipe for future volatility.

Failing to take these historical antecedents into account, America blundered into an occupation of Iraq that worsened an already unstable situation. In short order, the American regency of Paul Bremer swept away a long established order. Regime change brought in a new Shiite government that promptly disenfranchised the formerly dominant Sunnis. Thus began a cycle of sectarian conflict and civil war – rife with insurgencies, ethnic militias, car bombings, kidnappings, massacres, and more. Thus, the American misadventure started a sequence of events leading directly to the rise of ISIS.

A headline de jour fails to capture the broader perspectives of history. What our news media never told us: Every bungled misadventure by a Western power has upset the status quo and upped the ante on radicalism and savagery.

We broke it. Now our defense and diplomatic establishments exhort us to fix it. How ironic! Ethnic and religious divisions of the Middle East mirror our partisan divisions at home, as the current state of the debate in Washington demonstrates:

A war-weary American public says: “No boots on the ground.” Neo-Cons in Congress demand military action. 

Iraqi President al-Maliki disenfranchises the Sunnis and creates a window of opportunity for ISIS. The Cringe Fringe blames the crisis on the president. 

Al-Malady refuses to sign a Residual Force Agreement; The Cringe Fringe blames the president. 

Our military says ISIS cannot be defeated without a Syrian incursion. Last year, Congress failed to reach agreement on a similar authorization.

Follow the trail of duplicity amongst our allies in the region: ISIS trades Syrian oil for money and arms in Turkey, our NATO ally. Our military maintains vital strategic strike capabilities at al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Ali al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, and al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates even as the wealthy citizens of Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE underwrite radical jihadi groups throughout the Middle East – from al-Qaeda to ISIS.

How can the enemy of your enemy be your friend when you can no longer distinguish enemies from friends?

Meanwhile, partisans in Congress criticize the President over an honest admission: “We don't have a strategy yet” for dealing with the "existential threat" of ISIS. Perhaps the time is long overdue to rethink the complexities, duplicities and past failures - to avoid yet another national repetition compulsion - before we leap again into the Middle Eastern abyss.

I have seen the future

Or the selfie of the future, that is.

Selfie of the day, selfies of the week -- we can hardly breathe with the effort of working selfie into every page, every story, every moment of news.

6 uses of the word in a 15 second news spot and it's hardly unique. They're trending on Twitter and I effort to litter every page with SELFIES!

How did we ever get along without that word in those dull, crepuscular days without hashtags when only birds would tweet and that picture you took of yourself was a picture you took of yourself?  No,  selfie is here to stay and there is a future to come when old men in tattered backwards hats sit on park benches sharing shaky-handed selfies and  blowing farts through their boxers, belts around ankles and tweeting about efforting their bowel movements. Tattooed nonagenarians with Titanium hip replacements and gold-rimmed bifocal Google Glass, sharing selfies.

I have seen the future. Androgynous naked teens, covered in genetically engineered cat fur, brains wired together by the web, trending. They hide in the trees, laughing and taking selfies for their friends on the moon.

The Conundrum of Memory

Sometimes I get to wondering, sometimes I get confused about what our conservative brethren are trying to tell us.  I was reminded recently that my former Republican congressman Tom Rooney (R-FL) amongst others,  vociferously  threatened to impeach the president for having provided air traffic control for the UN incursions into Libya; for having exceeded his constitutional authority by arming Syrian rebels.  Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) back in June of 2013 threatened to impeach President Obama if any U.S. troops are killed in Syria.  Is there a relationship between rhetorical amplitude and political passion and the shortness of it's half-life? 


I ask because currently the same party is chastising him for not having gone into Syria thus allowing ISIS a breeding ground. We need those airstrikes -- why didn't he make those airstrikes?  We need airstrikes, says John McCain, in his time-worn tradition of  damning Obama if he does or if he doesn't.  Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wants to commit ground troops. This is all

 "due to our total inaction. And it's going to be one of the more shameful chapters in American history," says John McCain

Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire said the President's limited foreign policy is no longer acceptable. I have no idea whether that refers to the hundred airstrikes the Obama administration has unilaterally launched into Northern Iraq to help the hopelessly rickety and incompetent government Republicans bragged about setting up not long ago, but we can be assured of at least one thing: Republicans will damn him for doing it and damn him for not stepping in earlier back when they were trying to impeach him for it.