I know I shouldn’t be surprised by this kind of thing—and I’m not, really—but I’ll admit that every time I see or hear a liberal plumping for war I think, ‘I thought you guys were supposed to be against using violence to solve problems,’ until I remember, ‘Oh, yeah, liberals are just conservatives who love food stamps and public schools,’ and then everything comes back into focus again. And I’m not even talking about members of the professional pundit class, who are paid to toe the line of whatever party they happen to be, directly or indirectly, affiliated with. I’m talking about your regular Joe Arugula, the kind of guy who can be counted on to mouth all of the usual pieties about gay marriage and the minimum wage, and who no doubt voted for Obomba in part because he wasn’t going to drag us into some unnecessary war like that evil terrible Bush, droning on (no pun intended, of course) about chemical weapons and the Geneva conventions, and referring to Assad as a “bad guy” and suggesting that maybe, instead of firing a bunch of missiles into a country full of people, which might wind up killing a few innocent bystanders, they “bring back” the James Bond style assassination.* I guess it’s too much to expect that these people consider that a government that dumped millions of gallons of poison on one country (Agent Orange) and supported the use of nerve gas against another (Saddam, Iran), not to even mention the depleted uranium used a few years ago in Iraq, might not actually care about chemical weapons and might just being using them as a pretext to do something they’ve wanted to do all along for entirely different reasons.
*Paraphrasing a coworker who said all of the preceding this morning while talking to a neighbor in my cubicle subdivision here.
Pissing in the wind 