Short and Sweet Mr. Fielder

Gabriel Franks and John Schlembach did a great job of debunking the contents of a letter -to -the- editor written by Steve Fiedler of Victoria,so I will continue where they left off.

Mr. Fiedler said the president's inept handling of the Syrian civil war has showcased his hypocrisy. The president brought up the threat of a strike on Syria's chemical weapons had more to do with Assad's use of sarin gas than anything else. 

Mr Fielder is not aware of the 1993 Chemical Weapon Convention where 189 countries signed an agreement to outlaw the production,stockpiling and the use of chemical weapons. The United States has always been the country all other countries look to to enforce these rules. The president voiced his concern and what his intentions were for violating that agreement on his watch. He call call him an autocrat if he wishes but it is my opinion that any other president would have done the same;judging by previous events.

Those on the right are saying that if we would have supported the rebels two years ago, we would not be in this predicament. I'm not so sure of that because when we invaded Iraq,al Qaeda was not there but they inserted themselves into the war shortly after.

There is not a satisfactory answer for inaction after 100,000 were killed with conventional war weapons and an immediate condemnation after chemical weapons are used. It certainly not because some elite supporters of President Obama want it that way. We've had this question before when the people of Rwandan were slaughtered and there's no doubt that question will come up again.

Mr. Fielder said the president was compelled to strike Syria and that he compromised the mission's effectiveness by pre-announcing the details. That's laughable because Syria doesn't have the ability to stop the cruise missiles that would have been launched.

It's obvious Russia and Syria did not want these strikes because they were the first to blink.

I'm glad the president brought the issue to Congress because now,this will be the normal course of action before we go to war. We found out that America and the rest of the civilized world   are war weary. 

I'm reading about the events of Benghazi and what I've read nothing could have been done to save the lives of those four Americans just like others before them. This event has the right wing in a feeding frenzy hoping to weaken President Obama and have enough left over to derail the  candidacy of Hillary Clinton. I think it shows a lot of disrespect for the people who died in their sleep by sarin gas to compare them to an attack on our embassy. It's as if we have to choose between Americans dying and senseless killings. What chapter and verse does that come from?

Mr. Fiedler,you have lost the last two elections,so you are in no position to give advice. 

I think community organizers are to be admired not mocked besides President Obama worked in that capacity after he graduated from Columbia. You and Sarah Palin can make fun of community organizers but neither of you will attain the accomplishments of President Obama. 

I was for the miltary strikes in Syria because I trusted the military and the president and I was overjoyed when Obama decided to go through Congress. Having said that,diplomacy without the use of force is the best solution ,so I don't know how people like Steve Fiedlercan be so dismiissive. I lied,I knew when I saw the right wing boiler plate language in his letter. There wa the mention of Obamacare,socialist,community organizer,guns,Benghazi and hypocrisy.  

 

Just Throw logic Out the Window

                            

We have another letter-to-the editor from a local resident who thinks getting upset over 400 children being gassed as they slept, is just another diversionary tactic by President Obama to make us forget Fast and Furious and Benghazi.

Lets try a little logic here Mr Robert Simon. Do you really think our country  was concentrating on Fast and Furious and Benghazi before the issue of Syria came up?If your answer is ,yes,then I think you are probably an avid viewer of Fox News.

 Fast and Furious was a botched attempt by the AFT to follow arms being supplied to the Mexican drug cartel. How does this reflect the president? Benghazi is an ongoing investigation but in the end nothing will come of it and in a future blog I will detail the reasons why. The GOP was hoping Benghazi would tarnish President Obama in the last election. The right wing politicos tried to make a case of lies,cover up and distortion because Susan Rice said the terrorist were upset over a video mocking Mohammad,which was not true. 

I agree we were aware that Saddam Hussein was going to use chemical weapons and we did pinpoint the location of the Iranian forces for him. According to David Kay,U.N. weapons inspector,the sarin gas  Hussein used was a very unstable sarin gas , as opposed to the sarin gas Syria possesses. Russia supplied most the equipment,depots,and chemical making know- how and the Syrians refined it. As I stated before only state run governments have the ability to store and assemble the gas               onto a rocket. The rebels forces do not have any such facilities or a means to launch them. I don't buy Putin's assertion that the rebels used them on their own people in the territory they controlled just to get the United Staes to act.

Defense contractors and their contributions to politicians who will help them is not a revelation but they must of been surprised when an overwhelming amount of legislators were not willing to go to war. 

I always hear this talk of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights being trampled on and our rights being denied but  I haven't sen any evidence of that.Did things change after 9/11? Of course they did because our enemies have changed. I agree we overcompensated at times but that doesn't mean we can't correct those errors.

I don't think the news outlets have been bought off because of the overabundance of sources of news and your letter is a good example of that. The news outlets can no longer afford to hire a lot of good investigative journalists nor can they afford to send them to all of the world's hot spots. 

I think the Syrian situation is rapidity changing but the horrors of a civil war is not. Van Jones answer to the skeptics of how Obama is handing the situation is one I agree with. 

The president's detractors are saying that the president is weak because he is constantly changing his mind,  Van Jones said " the diplomatic road has  many curves and the president is following that road to find a peaceful resolution." I am paraphrasing but the point is ,diplomacy is not easy.    

    

                                                                

A New Age of Dipomacy?

Immediately after the president's speech last night someone posted this tweet" It was a 16 minutes speech  that will turn into three days of scrutiny."  They were right because shortly after Joe Scarborough read a litany of negative articles criticizing Obama's speech,Cokie Roberts, said that his tele- prompter was too high because he need to face the American people eye- to- eye. She also said the speech should have been given at the White House residency to give it a homely look. It wasn't until 2 hours later that Lawrence O'Donnell injected some truth into the conversation. He said that not one of those astute writers offered a solution.

The people at Fox were praising Putin for pulling a fast one on our president. I thought they were going to run Putin  as their candidate for president. They they changed their tune because someone must have whispered in their ear that a peaceful settlement might help the president. They then starting saying that the president is foolish for trusting Assad and Putin.  

Joe Scarborough thinks President Obama stumbled into this recent development where Russia and Syria agreed that the latter must give up their chemical weapons. No Joe,while you and Andrea Mitchell were criticizing Obama for going to the G20 in Russia instead of staying home to find and twist the arms of the scared Congressmen hiding underneath their desks,  Obama had a  late night dinner with Putin which might have sealed the deal. 

There is constant chatter about us having a weak president and country without acknowledging that it was Assad who went to CBS pleading for a no strike. It is Putin who now is willing to be a broker in getting Syria to give up their chemical weapons;which they say they never had.

I believe were it not for a threat of military action,Putin would have never come to the table. Damascus,Stria is a very important seaport for Russia, The threat of terrorism scares the Russians and the possibility of those chemical weapons falling into the hands of terrorist in the southern most region of their country gives them an incentive to find,secure and eventually destroy the weapons. 

Andrea Mitchell quickly pointed to a pentagon report from the 90s  that said it would take 

75,000 UN troops to find and secure all the chemical weapons. Our friend Israel knows where 80% of those weapons are because they have been tracking them. Andrea said it would be impossible to transport the weapons in an ongoing civil war. I think a cease-fire resolution might work because nobody but al -Qaeda wants to use these weapons.

Lawrence O'Donnell continues to be a nemesis for a shoot-from-the hip,Joe Scarborough.

Joe said if the president was soundly defeated in Congress he would been an ineffective,weak president on domestic and foreign affairs. Lawrence reminded Joe that George H. W. Bush had  approval ratings in the high 80s after liberating Kuwait but he didn't have a clue about the economy and lost to Bill Clinton a few months later.

Then there is the spokesman for the new isolationist wing of the GOP,Rand Paul. who has a lot of hypotheticals but no real answers other than Obama is wrong. He insists that the president is helping al-Qaeda gain Syria but somehow killing Assad would be OK..Want to or not,leaving Assad in power is the best solution for now (the devil we know) in keeping that area stable. Yes,Assad has the military might to keep the New Syrian Army out of power for a long time. One of these days ,we are going to have realize that democracy is not for everyone. 

The speech was on target with what the president has been saying all along. He's not calling for regime change because that might not be in our best interest.  The message we send to North Korea and Iran that we will not tolerate chemical warfare has to mean something. Yes,the speech can be sliced and diced to mean something else for the naysayers but that's to be expected.  

IT'S A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION

This morning I heard an argument from Joe Scarborough that's at the core of disagreements between the supporters of President Obama and those who hate everything he stands for. 

Joe started out by rolling  out his preconceived arguments that Obama is a weak out -of-place president who is now making us look foolish worldwide. There's no argument that Joe's perception may  be correct right now because a lot of people are hearing that message.  Howard Dean landed a powerful blow to Joe's theory when he called  it " phony Washington hooey. " And those remarks coming from Dean ,at 6:00 AM, really pissed off  the blowhard, Joe Scarborough.

The issue was the remark that Obama made in Stockholm yesterday, when he said that his credibility was not on the line,the credibility of the international community and that of Congress was on the line. 

Understanding liberals or even the wiliness to do so ,has  never been a priority for conservatives ,who think they control the normal train of thought. People like Joe Scarborough likes a man of few words who can make an instant decision and stick to it ;even if he's wrong. They put a lot of emphasis on the spoken word as they literally interpret it. Joe Scarborough thought that President Obama was shifting blame for his red line comment but he was not. President Obama is willing to back up his "red line" remark with limited military strikes, but he's not willing to give the international community or Congress a pass for their  unwillingness to enforce  the ban on the use of chemical weapons resolution of 1972,because it has been ratified several times. We didn't do anything when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his own people and approved it when the dictator used it against Iran. If we're aren't serious   as many nations clearly are not,or if we want to selectively enforce the ban on the use of chemical weapons,then we should amend the resolution.

I believe the other 187 nations who approved the ban of the use of chemical weapons don't have the moral courage of their convictions like our country does.   Yes,our country's credibility was severally damaged 10 years ago and the other countries have a right to be skeptical. Having said that,they have the same intelligence we do, "that was then and this is now." It's easy to sit on the back bench and yell "Iraq all over agin."  

President Obama,Secretary Kerry and Hagel  are not war mongers,no matter how you slice it. Each have expressed their displeasure of war,but  answering an obvious violation on the use of chemical weapons crosses a line that they can't consciously ignore.

President Obama didn't ignore the other four uses of sarin gas by Assad;he didn't have enough evidence to lay the blame on the current regime.

Joe Scarborough keeps faulting President Obama for saying "Assad must go" and then  he remains in power. In due time Joe,we have a deliberate president not a "shoot from the hip" cowboy. 

Marco Rubio will vote against the resolution because it will help him with his anti-Obama theme in his 2016 presidential run.  The senator says the action is "too little, too late" because he thinks the administration should have taken action two years ago in supporting a pro-American rebel uprising. That's laughable,the president will have a hard time getting the votes for a limited two days of strikes and all of a sudden Rubio thinks the GOP would have supported Obama in arming the rebels. Oh,I've heard the call for action by the GOP but that was prior to voting for such action. Other reason the conservatives are angry with the president;he makes them put their money where their mouth is.

Several leading liberals in Congress and in the media are dead set against an intervention in Syria. People like Charlie Rangel,Ed Schultz,Chris Hayes and Chris Matthews disagree with President Obama and his reason for limited strikes. In fact national polls show that Americans do not support striking Syria. It's funny how the memories of 9/11 are beginning to fade but the memory of Iraq is still there. 

Indecision on Syria

Since I didn't have much else to do, I watched just about every program that mentioned Syria. You'd be surprised how many armchair generals (pundits) know exactly what needs to be done and how it will turn out.

I was very disappointed in the media coverage, especially Meet the Press with David Gregory. It seemed like David was more interested in  Obama's change of mind and its effect on his aide's feelings, than he was on the final decision. I expected that from Chris Wallace, and I was not disappointed. Chris Wallace asked John Kerry if it was appropriate for the Pres. to take VP Joe Biden golfing after decision was made. Here's my take on the golf outing: VP Joe Biden has been under a lot of stress lately concerning his son's recent illness and the weight of the worlds problems; a relaxing golf outing where the two leaders could relax makes a lot of sense to me.

The media correctly  stated that the shadow of  the  Iraq War looms large in the decision making of this president and for those of our allies.

The president's. enemies said his Indecisive  actions makes him look weak to our friends and foes. I disagree,President Obama is a deliberate person and not one to make a hasty decision. Besides,he's the Commander- in -Chief of the world's mightiest ,most advance military,so how could he possibly be weak? The British Parliament made a hastily decision to come back to vote without the full body and we saw the results. Who knows how many world leader's minds will be changed while we await our Congress to debate? Our military got to see the Syrian response when they thought they were going to get shelled. The Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff General Dempsey told the president that the same fixed targets would be there tomorrow or next month.

The president reminded those who call him a dictator that we have a "Constitutional Democracy" and now is the time to utilize that responsibility. Many of the president's detractors say he has weaken the special war powers of the president  forever. I think  it was a brilliant move, because those who usually sit on the sideline and throw verbal bombs will now have to cast a vote stating what they'll do in a similar situation. Many of those legislators will hear what they said in 2001 prior to the Iraq War.The Tea Party member who thought they were only sent to Washington to cut taxes,spending and defund Obamacare will have a rude awakening beginning September 9,2013.

Yesterdy,on Meet the Press,Bill Kristol took the first step in mending fence ,by admitting that Bush 41 made several mistakes prior to liberating the people of Kuwait in 1991. He went on to say that last weeks missteps by the Obama Administration won't amount to anything.

Accountability is what's missing these days. All of the Democratic candidates for president in 2008 had to admit that their vote for the Iraq War was a mistake. Hillary Clinton says she was mislead but that was not enough and that's the reason she lost. The GOP will not admit their mistakes ;be it the Iraq War or the 2008 financial crisis; they won't even admit that Obama legitimately won the 2008 and 2012 elections.The fact that they are a leaderless party may be a big reason for that.

No question,the country is war weary because half of the Syrian rebels have extremist Islamic ties and they are fighting a ruthless dictator.It's foolish to take sides in a civil war that will go on for decades.On the other hand, can we sit idly as a ruthless dictator uses chemical weapons on innocent children and civilians?The president has been criticized for issuing his "Red Line" statement  but can you name one American president who would not have done the same?

Oh, Whatever

This morning was one of the few times when I have ever agreed with Joe Scarborough, but I approved when he said that the non- crazy wing of the Republican Party is starting to realize that the wing nuts of their party have lost all sense of reality. It’s one thing to argue about economics’; it’s another thing to rally around shutting down the government over an obsession to defund Obamacare. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard Senator Ted Cruz tell CNN’s Candy Crowley that President Obama would agree to defund Obamacare under the right conditions. Joe Scarborough laughed hysterically when conservative/ libertarian Senator Jeff Flake responded to an ad that was running against him because he refused to defund Obamacare. Senator Flake responded with a simple tweet “oh, whatever.”

I’ve got to remember to tell myself “oh, whatever” when I see a post stating that hospitals don’t make a huge profit and that the insurance companies and the government are the reason for the high cost of health care. Last night, Chris Hayes said a bag of saline, including the ingredients of salt and water cost about 44¢ but they charge the patient $191.00 and another $1000 for the use of the operating room. That one poster  I mentioned said that the charge for attending nurses and other costs were part of the saline cost but that’s not true. Every item that a hospital charges has its own unique price. I’m thinking how much my orthopedic surgeon saved the insurance company by using an outpatient service and sending me home the very same day.

Another “oh, whatever” moment is the fallacy that welfare is going to lead us to financial ruin. The $235 billion we spend on the non-working poor amounts to about 10% of the federal budget according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. There’s a formula using census data to figure out where this money goes. First you have to combine all the costs of such programs to come up with the base total. Then you have to subtract spending on the elderly, and the disabled. In that figure will be vets, children, survivors of parents who have died, people on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SSI. Finally we have to add up unemployment insurance, EITC and child tax credits understanding that people move in and out of these programs all the time. These programs come under the Non-discretionary spending and are required by law, so the battle is always about a percentage change or the amount of cost of living adjustments. You will see the GOP fixated on these programs in the upcoming budget battles and the Democrats will fight to keep the cuts as small as possible.

All the insignificant stuff will have to take a backseat to whatever we do militarily against Syria in the next few days. No serious person will question the amount of money we spend to send Syrian president, Bashar al Assad, a message that the international community will not tolerate the use of sarin gas on civilians or military personnel. The last I heard, it costs us about a million dollars to launch just one Tomahawk missile. According to the polls, Americans do not want us to engage in any type of military intervention in Syria but this is one of those cases where the president will have to take action despite the will of its citizenry. President Obama might have one of those “oh, whatever” moments.

Remember, don’t look for a new blog tomorrow but please keep checking because I might be back sooner than later…

Another (*yawn) Sunday Talk Show Roundup

Ed Schultz, said that the four talk show discussions took 193 minutes and of that, only 7 minutes were used to talk about jobs. That’s unless you count repealing Obamacare as a job-creation  plan like the Republicans.

I can’t tell  you what Meet the Press was about because David Gregory was all over the map. I was surprised that women do not want the government giving them equal pay- for- equal work; according to Representative Marshall Blackburn of Tennessee.

Fox News Sunday was about Chris Wallace encouraging the GOP to charge Eric holder with perjury.  Later in another segment, Chris was surprised when Laura Ingraham and Evan Bly didn’t  want  to go into Syria and dispose President Bashar Al-Assad. Laura said we should have learned from our mistake of invading Iraq. The joke is on us because we have just learned that China will make a fortune on Iraq’s oil. The invasion of Iraq benefited Iran and China, but Fox is consumed with the three so-called scandals and getting involved in another war.

This week with George Stephanopoulos, was by far the best talk show this past Sunday.  You know, if I were Karl Rowe and the GOP, I would encourage investigating the facts, but I would refrain from preaching. Karl Rowe is comfortable spreading his lies on Fox News because he has no one to challenge him.  Yesterday, he met his match with Arianna Huffington and David Plouffe.  Karl Rowe is a pathological liar, and he’s perfected it with a lot of practice. He was prepared when Arianna accused the group he was associated with, Crossroads GPS of manipulating their tax -exempt status.  Karl made the mistake of trying to take the high- road because it doesn't take a genius to bring out the abuses of the Bush administration. David Plouffe reminded Karl that the Bush administration IRS audited the NAACP because of what the then leader said about the war in Iraq. David also reminded Karl about the firing of all of the U.S. attorneys for political reasons and the actions of Alberto Gonzalez and Andy Card when they went to the sickbed of the Atty. General to try to get him to sign- off on an illegal spying program. The look on Karl Rowe’s face(after being fact checked by Plouffe and Huffington)  was priceless;he looked like the cat who just got caught eating the canary. 

I did hear of a novel idea to fund an infrastructure project.  A  legislator is trying to create a bill for American corporations who are participating in tax shelter schemes overseas. The bill will give them a chance to do something patriotic.  The legislation would try to  persuade them to invest in low interest tax -exempt bonds to fund our needed infrastructure.  We already have a plan to put up the first one trillion dollars, but it needs to be passed by Congress.