The Official Syria (and all things about it) Thread

[Hornesia]

He could just order all soldiers not to wear boots...

[San-Silvacian]

He could just order all soldiers not to wear boots...

Shhh.

[Alien Space Bats]

Oh God, you're not joking.



<madness mantra> It's only Rush Limbaugh...It's only Rush Limbaugh...It's only Rush Limbaugh...It's only Rush Limbaugh...

....who'm I fooling? There're the legions of dittoheads, too.

You live in Australia. You can be forgiven. You don't actually have to listen to American talk radio.

Once you've listened to the full day's lineup, you'll realize that it builds to a crescendo — and, to use a baseball metaphor (because my Tigers are likely to make the playoffs again [hooray!]) — it's a lineup in which Rush Limbaugh is just the lead-off man.

You haven't experience the full horror of conservative talk radio until you spent an entire day immersed in it, beginning with Rush Limbaugh and ending with Mark Levine (with Sean Hannity somewhere in the middle [twice, if you catch him on the air before dinner and on FOX News afterwards]). Every single day of the weak, that Clear Channel/FOX News line-up runs from slander and lies to outright sedition. By the time Levine signs off the air, he's got every red-blooded Republican lovingly fingering his automatic rifle and just waiting for the Minuteman's call.

The report I cited represents the first time Rush has actually come out and called the President a Muslim Marxist mass-murdering monster; what you have to realize is that Levine has called him that just about every night for the last four-and-a-half years. Whatever Limbaugh does, the others amplify — and now Rush has taken it past "11" all the way up to "14".

It would make a wild movie if it wasn't for real: America: Enter the Crazy.

[Rio Cana]

No boots on the ground here either..................

(Image)

The Japanese did send in boots to there main US target.

Main US target of the Japanese in WW II - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssSDELFWdYc

[North America Inc]

Must not be allowed to prevail in the Middle East?
You're about two millennia too late, son.

I know I am really, really late but that was the funniest quote I have read today.

[Quebec and Atlantic Canada]

I'm not liking Brown's reelection chances. He's going to be slaughtered. Even the rabidly liberal Erwin Chemerinsky implied that it was a mistake. Also means less votes in California for Democrats in the upcoming election.

Now, this won't shift the 2016 presidential election by much. But it can shift the House of Representatives even more to favor the "Party of No". The Republican strategy emerging here is simple: stay in power and disillusion the voters. And in order to do so, they need the House of Reps, so that they can keep on saying "no!" to the Democrat President, and then accuse the Government of being inept.

Isn't this the same state that voted for the Governator to return in 2007, and then voted for Obama a year later?

Yeah, Brown would have to fuck up HORRIFICALLY to lose next year's GE. Maybe he could be primaried (though I use that "maybe" very loosely), but there's no way Brown will lose to whatever no-name the CA-GOP puts up if he's heading the Democratic ticket. As for Governator, he was a moderate while today's CA-GOP is pretty right-wing, and he only won on name recognition in 2003 anyway.

[New Chalcedon]

Let me start with this:

Also, this seems to ring true, and I'd like peoples' opinions, particularly ASB's:

The risk of Democrats getting primaried by other Democrats over support for the AUMF is being grossly overestimated by a Beltway media that is congenitally incapable of viewing Democrats and Republicans as anything other than mirror images of one another (eg., "Both Parties have become more radical in recent years", "Neither Party seems capable of compromise", "Both Parties are being overly ideological and obstructionist", etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum).

The thing is, Democrats aren't like Republicans; there isn't any real danger of left-wing antiwar radicals rising up to challenge mainstream Democrats who toe the Party line rather than catering to the grass roots. Just because Republicans are at risk of being "tarred and feathered" (and I'm going to use that phrase in the future to describe what the Tea Party does to "RINO's", since it fits in with their motif better than any other term I can come up with) doesn't mean that a parallel situation exists among Democrats as well.

Beyond that — and again I'd prefer to discuss the 2014 election in a different thread — I'll repeat what I said earlier: Democrats (and, for that matter, Republicans) are (both) going to be more motivated by domestic issues come 2014 that they will be by foreign policy. Syria may seem like big news now, but where will it rate in another 14 months, after all of the crap that we're likely to see from GOP-run States (TRAP laws, union busting, voter suppression, etc.) and the Republican House (playing chicken with the budget, playing chicken with the debt, stalling appointments, manufacturing "scandals", and "repealing" Obamacare for the 69th time) between now and then?

A very interesting analysis, and one I agree with the broad thrust of. However, "Yea" votes on Iraq lost some Democrats their primaries in subsequent electoral cycles...and the fates of (among others) Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton, who were both repeatedly beaten over their heads with their Iraq votes in close primaries are probably sticking in the minds of wavering Democrats (particularly those in ultra-safe seats, like urban New York).

Now, I started with that so I could listen with one ear to the latest news while writing what follows:

Well, the "briefing" that a number of people (including ASB, if I'm not mistaken) anticipated would sway lawmakers in favour of the proposed AUMF has happened....

.....and it doesn't seem to have changed any. In fact, shortly after leaving the briefing, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), one of the most conservative Democrats left in the Senate, announced that he'd vote "nay" to an AUMF, stating that "all diplomatic options must be exhausted first". In the House, people as diverse as Carol Shea-Porter (moderate D-NH) and Elijah Cummings (liberal D-MD) have announced opposition as well, in some cases after hearing the briefing.

I'm going to bring up a point that ASB made earlier, namely that the Administration's "damning evidence" against Assad would be released at the briefings:



I pause for my esteemed colleague's reply, now that it's clear that the evidence isn't all that damning - for if it was, it'd have changed at least a few Democrats' minds.

At this hour, I can't yet link the "A" block from Al Sharpton's show on MSNBC, Politics Nation, but the Reverend just addressed this very question less than 10 minutes ago, as did Ed Schultz on The Ed Show, just beforehand: It's not that Democrats don't believe the President (in fact, the consensus from them is that they do, in fact, believe that Assad was behind the chemical attack on Ghouta; the intelligence appears to have convinced them). No, the problem seems to be that Democrats aren't buying the rest of the Administration's argument (either in the sense that they either don't believe that we can deter further chemical attacks by the Assad regime with military strikes, or that they don't see how the Administration's chosen course of action is going to result in regime change [which in fact it's not intended to do anyway] — or both). This has got Democrats balking, in that they don't want a wider war and apparently don't believe that the Administration will be able to guarantee that their proposed strikes won't get us into one.

As well they shouldn't - history is replete with examples of small wars that didn't stay small.

This explains Sen. Manchin's remarks about wanting to "exhaust" diplomatic options. You don't say that you want to pursue a diplomatic solution if you believe that there wasn't any sarin attack, or that the sarin was unleashed by the rebels; no, you say that if you agree with the Administration that Assad gassed his own people, but you don't see military force as an answer to that problem.

If you agree that Assad gassed his own people (for the record, I consider it unproven as yet - the gassing happened, but I have yet to see or be directed to any conclusive evidence as to who ordered it), then what other option is there? As you yourself have noted, failure to punish the use of chemical weapons, when you're confident about who used them, will only encourage their use in other situations.

And while Putin likes the idea of sticking his thumb in Uncle Sam's eye, even he doesn't want to see the KPA using such weapons if and when Kim the least kicks off another war.

So no, this hasn't changed my position on the issue. I think that when — not if — Congress refuses to authorize force, Assad will go crazy slaughtering his own people (in my view, he launched the attack on Ghouta on the basis of a calculation that the West would do nothing about it)

Who wants to be monarch of a wasteland? From the way he ruled prior to the revolt, Assad's greedy, not stupid.

and Putin will supply him all the arms and support he needs to do it with both hands.

True - Putin's already made his commitment to supporting the Assad regime clear.

The West will scream in horror but do nothing, while Jordan and Turkey get inundated with refugees.

Don't forget Lebanon.

What follows from there depends on how hard Russia wants to push its diplomatic advantage and how pissed off it gets if the world fails to show it the proper "respect" in the wake of its victory (as well as whether or not it thinks that partisan rancor has left Washington completely paralyzed and unable to defend its own interests, allowing Moscow to reshape the planet to its liking while America is "otherwise occupied").

First, I must ask a question: are you sure you haven't applied an excess of Cold War logic to this situation?

Second, I rather doubt that there'll be a second Cold War come out of this situation - Russia's still big and powerful, but no-one pretends that it's the superpower the USSR was.

Oh God, you're not joking.



<madness mantra> It's only Rush Limbaugh...It's only Rush Limbaugh...It's only Rush Limbaugh...It's only Rush Limbaugh...

....who'm I fooling? There're the legions of dittoheads, too.

You live in Australia. You can be forgiven. You don't actually have to listen to American talk radio.

Once you've listened to the full day's lineup, you'll realize that it builds to a crescendo — and, to use a baseball metaphor (because my Tigers are likely to make the playoffs again [hooray!]) — it's a lineup in which Rush Limbaugh is just the lead-off man.

You haven't experience the full horror of conservative talk radio until you spent an entire day immersed in it, beginning with Rush Limbaugh and ending with Mark Levine (with Sean Hannity somewhere in the middle [twice, if you catch him on the air before dinner and on FOX News afterwards]). Every single day of the weak, that Clear Channel/FOX News line-up runs from slander and lies to outright sedition. By the time Levine signs off the air, he's got every red-blooded Republican lovingly fingering his automatic rifle and just waiting for the Minuteman's call.

The report I cited represents the first time Rush has actually come out and called the President a Muslim Marxist mass-murdering monster; what you have to realize is that Levine has called him that just about every night for the last four-and-a-half years. Whatever Limbaugh does, the others amplify — and now Rush has taken it past "11" all the way up to "14".

It would make a wild movie if it wasn't for real: America: Enter the Crazy.

Whoo....and I thought Alan "the Parrot" Jones was bad. But then, he is only one person, not a whole lineup ranging from crazy to treasonous.

EDIT: Grats on the good baseball news

[Quebec and Atlantic Canada]

I forgot the link.

Oh God, you're not joking.



<madness mantra> It's only Rush Limbaugh...It's only Rush Limbaugh...It's only Rush Limbaugh...It's only Rush Limbaugh...

....who'm I fooling? There're the legions of dittoheads, too.

Don't forget the legions of crypto-Stalinists who would unironically parrot claims Obama was roasting babies on open fire and raping their corpses because it made the US look bad.

[Shofercia]

I'm not liking Brown's reelection chances. He's going to be slaughtered. Even the rabidly liberal Erwin Chemerinsky implied that it was a mistake. Also means less votes in California for Democrats in the upcoming election.

Now, this won't shift the 2016 presidential election by much. But it can shift the House of Representatives even more to favor the "Party of No". The Republican strategy emerging here is simple: stay in power and disillusion the voters. And in order to do so, they need the House of Reps, so that they can keep on saying "no!" to the Democrat President, and then accuse the Government of being inept.

Isn't this the same state that voted for the Governator to return in 2007, and then voted for Obama a year later?

Don't compare the two. For presidential voting, California follow this algorithm:

1. Is Candidate WWII hero? If yes, vote for him. Else, continue...
2. Is Candidate considered to be Californian, by most Californians? If yes, vote for him. Else, continue...
3. If you're here, vote Democrat, in Honor of FDR.

Seriously, that's been the voting algorithm ever since FDR took office.

1932 - FDR
1936 - FDR
1940 - FDR
1944 - FDR
1948 - FDR's bitch (Truman)
1952 - Ike (War Hero)
1956 - Ike (War Hero)
1960 - Nixon (Californian)
1964 - Johnson (Democrat)
1968 - Nixon (Californian)
1972 - Nixon (Californian)
1976 - Ford, VP of Nixon, who was a Californian.
1980 - Reagan (Californian)
1984 - Reagan (Californian)
1988 - Bush, VP of Reagan, who was a Californian.
1992 - Clinton (Democrat)
1996 - Clinton (Democrat)
2000 - Gore (Democrat)
2004 - Kerry (Democrat)
2008 - Obama (Democrat)
2012 - Obama (Democrat)

So with two exceptions, and since WWII heroes are no longer running for president, here's the rule: we'll vote for any Californian, but if none run, then the Dems get our vote. It's just that simple. That's the trend since 1932, with two exceptions in twenty one elections. And yes, smartasses, I'm well aware where Nixon was legally registered, but he was still considered a Californian by many, when he ran.

Source: http://www.270towin.com/states/California

Actually, now that I look at it, the exception came after periods of a Californian as president, and where the candidate served as their vice president, i.e. Ford and Bush.

[Shofercia]

Isn't this the same state that voted for the Governator to return in 2007, and then voted for Obama a year later?

Yeah, Brown would have to fuck up HORRIFICALLY to lose next year's GE. Maybe he could be primaried (though I use that "maybe" very loosely), but there's no way Brown will lose to whatever no-name the CA-GOP puts up if he's heading the Democratic ticket. As for Governator, he was a moderate while today's CA-GOP is pretty right-wing, and he only won on name recognition in 2003 anyway.

He did. You don't fuck with the environment. See Carly Fiorina's guide on "How to Not Get Elected". And you don't fuck with the Proposition Process. See Cruz Bustamante's & Darrel Issa's guide on "How to Not Get Elected". Brown fucked with the Proposition Process. What's worse, SCOTUS made that a critical issue. It's going to be used against Brown in 2014. Would you like to bet that he won't be reelected? Cause he pulled a Fiorina, and SCOTUS screamed that he pulled a Fiorina.

[Souriya Al-Assad]

Its official, the "evidence" from the US and France isn't solid at all. (Told the Dutch intelligent service to the Dutch gouverment yesterday)
-No link, sorry

In other news, Germany claims to have prove that Assad was involved but still refuses to take part in any military action.

http://nos.nl/artikel/547698-duits-bewijs-tegen-assad.html

This is another to the point Dutch article.

Everyones knows who did it but they won't tell.

The death squads did it, unfortunately their hypocritical neo-imperialist backers do not want to admit that they were wrong in arming these scoundrels to commence with.

No, because the Gulf will never allow otherwise. Not to mention that almost all the "rebels" on the ground have fantasies of committing sectarian genocide after the war, or moving on to massacring people in neighbouring Lebanon, or pass through Iraq to then massacre against Iranians, which some of these "rebels" already call "Rafidah", "Mushrikis", amongst other names, that to them "must be cleansed".

Trust me, I have heard this rhetoric from lots of them too many times not to think otherwise.

[Citation need]

With all due honourable respect of course I have the sources. I shall post them as soon as I finish assembling them all together. Whilst the Tweets containing this I shall send a telegramme to you since this is what I consider somewhat personal. (I do not want everyone here to flood my social media accounts en masse)

No boots on the ground here either..................

(Image)

I think I am going to quote this... definitely.

He could just order all soldiers not to wear boots...

Shhh.

Roman wooden sandals....ssshhh...

[Pacifornia]

Has anybody else in the US contacted their reps about intervention? I sent an email to mine but I got a generic response

[Grand Britannia]

Has anybody else in the US contacted their reps about intervention? I sent an email to mine but I got a generic response

I bet they value your feedback and consider it paramount to the democratic process.

[Souriya Al-Assad]

Has anybody else in the US contacted their reps about intervention? I sent an email to mine but I got a generic response

It will not be enough. I am going to make a petition against Hollande.

I suggest Americans do the same concerning their leaders, a massively signed petition (might) do the work necessary to stop this madness.

[Pacifornia]

Has anybody else in the US contacted their reps about intervention? I sent an email to mine but I got a generic response

I bet they value your feedback and consider it paramount to the democratic process.

And unicorns and leprechauns exist. I wish they could take their constituents seriously but they're too busy to bother with us

[Dangelia]

Doesn't anyone ever get tired talking about Syria?

[Pacifornia]

Doesn't anyone ever get tired talking about Syria?

I guess there are other things to worry about as well, including personal things.

[Souriya Al-Assad]

Doesn't anyone ever get tired talking about Syria?

No, because I love Syria too much to stop talking about it.

[Soviet Russia Republic]

Doesn't anyone ever get tired talking about Syria?

If I was tired of it, I wouldn't talk/post about Syria to anyone anywhere.

[Shofercia]

Doesn't anyone ever get tired talking about Syria?

If I was tired of it, I wouldn't talk/post about Syria to anyone anywhere.

Speaking of that, you want to play Risk?

[Viperco1]

Just got this from the news.

Senator Dianne Feinstein: "The responses from my constituents are overwhelmingly negative, but then again they don't know what I know."

Well I probably wasn't going to vote for her anyways. Glad I just copied and pasted my e-mail to her from the one I sent to my congressman, same party though so it probably means nothing.

[Shofercia]

Just got this from the news.

Senator Dianne Feinstein: "The responses from my constituents are overwhelmingly negative, but then again they don't know what I know."

Well I probably wasn't going to vote for her anyways. Glad I just copied and pasted my e-mail to her from the one I sent to my congressman, same party though so it probably means nothing.

Speaking of Senator Fienstein: http://www.alternet.org/story/145661/de ... re_farmers

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/200 ... sis/print/

Well, she certainly knows more than the voters

[Shrillland]

Has anybody else in the US contacted their reps about intervention? I sent an email to mine but I got a generic response

It will not be enough. I am going to make a petition against Hollande.

I suggest Americans do the same concerning their leaders, a massively signed petition (might) do the work necessary to stop this madness.

We've tried protesting and petitions. It didn't work with Vietnam, and it didn't work with Iraq either. Once America wants war they will take it.

Doesn't anyone ever get tired talking about Syria?

Not really.

[Genivaria]

I was just told that Congress voted yes on Syria, I can't find confirmation.

[Souriya Al-Assad]

It will not be enough. I am going to make a petition against Hollande.

I suggest Americans do the same concerning their leaders, a massively signed petition (might) do the work necessary to stop this madness.

We've tried protesting and petitions. It didn't work with Vietnam, and it didn't work with Iraq either. Once America wants war they will take it.

Doesn't anyone ever get tired talking about Syria?

Not really.

So... all hope is lost then.

I was just told that Congress voted yes on Syria, I can't find confirmation.

If this is true, this means our Assemblé Nationale is going to follow suit, which means......... war.