As we promised to start the week, Monday already proved the news is not playing around this week. Yesterday alone included the "Where's Waldo"-like drama of the Edward Snowden story - including the news that Snowden appears to have targeted the NSA, the knock-knock joke opening from the defense attorney in the George Zimmerman murder trial, and the major news from the IRS that "progressive" groups - like other groups including conservatives - had also been among their targets for "special attention".
At the Supreme Court, six decisions came down Monday, including a substantive anti-worker decision, along with a major punt from the Court on the issue of Affirmative Action that sidestepped virtually all the difficult questions. In the U.S. Senate, for once, a difficult task was successfully tackled head-on, as immigration reform passed a key test vote in the U.S. Senate, 67-27.
Today is shaping up to be another major news day with more important decisions from the Supreme Court likely, the major announcement from President Obama of his sweeping actions on climate change, the Senate race in Massachusetts, and a major battle over women's rights and abortion in Texas.
Oh - and HealthCare.gov is now officially active as well.
If you're thinking there are a few things we haven't mentioned yet, you'd be right. Peering at the surging volume of news below us, Americans of all kinds are straining just to hang on, like a dog owner getting dragged to edge of a very nasty cliff.
At least one version of that cliff includes a monster at the bottom that is the Syrian civil war - and it should surprise no one that the gutless curs of the corporate military industry are chomping at the bit to drag the rest of us over that edge.
Before America does get involved any further than a pledge to give weapons to rebels - which is already a far worse idea than most will admit - we should definitely take half a moment in this maelstrom to look seriously at what the Syrian conflict is.
Not only is the Syrian conflict hopelessly confusing, politically, but there are no real heroes on any side. Even the military experts at the Pentagon have made it clear that serious intervention in Syria would be logistically untenable, politically impossible, and fiscally suicidal. Even legitimate analysis from overseas notes that Syrian jihadis are already dividing against themselves, in what is already becoming a wider regional conflict.
We're not going to say what's happening in Syria is acceptable, on a humanitarian level. It's not. However, Syria is also a political and military conflict that has no one who truly sides with the best interests of America, or really much of the rest of the world.
To let those drooling for America get our nation involved in yet another war, and pull the rest of us over the edge into the mess that is Syria, is simply not an option at this time. Thanks to chickenhawk conservatives and weak liberals, America has already wasted nearly a dozen years, in multiple wars overseas.
We've simply got too much going on at home right now, as a nation, to go fight monsters for somebody else.
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