Idiocracy: Obama Official Doesn't Know Geography of Country U.S. is to Bomb

In a sign of our sad times of moral and intellectual decline, a White House official involved in a briefing with reporters prior to dear leader's big speech on ISIS divulged the dismal quality of this administration. Going to war is a gravely serious matter and launching a new one - as Obama did with his nationally televised decree - should be seriously thought out. Shooting from the hip, particularly in an election year when politics take priority over reasonable decision making should be forbidden. There are long-term consequences to the nation as well as lives at risk whenever there is a commitment to go to war and it is not something that should be taken lightly nor presided over by idiots.

We are talking about dealing in American blood and treasure here and if our servicemen and women are to be sent into battle in a foreign land the very least that they can expect is that there will be the utmost of competence by those who dispatch them there. It is very hard to find such competence when an administration is as packed with morons, lackeys, cronies, ass-kissers and buffoons as this one is. The case in point being that someone within the Obama Department of Dumbassery doesn't even understand the simple geography of a country that is about to be bombed by the U.S. military.

According to a story in The Washington Post entitled "White House struggles with Mideast geography":

Maybe before they extend the airstrikes against the Islamic State too far, the White House might want to double check the geography.

Obama administration officials, briefing reporters before the president’s Wednesday night televised speech, made it clear that borders, especially the border between Syria and Iraq, will not be an impediment to U.S. airstrikes.

Speaking “on background,” one official said, “We are dealing with an organization that operates freely across the border, so we will not be restrained by that border in our determination to conduct airstrikes against ISIL (or IS or ISIS or the Islamic State).”

Then a second official reemphasized that a number of countries in the region were worried about the ISIS threat moving across borders. One of the briefers noted that the terrorist army “has been I think a galvanizing threat around the Sunni partners in the region. They view it as an existential threat to them. Saudi Arabia has an extensive border with Syria.”

This was truly news. So we checked our own maps. No, Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an extensive border with Syria. Jordan has a rather large chunk of land between them.

Can somebody please start the impeachment proceedings now?  Rank and file, low-information types calling for military action against a country that they are unable to identify on a map is understandable. However, when it comes to government officials the bar should be set much higher. It is like we have finally reached the point where the cult-classic movie Idiocracy has become a prophecy as to the future of America.

Jesus H. Christ, we are totally fucked! 

Establishment Begins Building the Case Against Putin

You have to give it to the extremists that run the US government war machine these days, they are predictable to a fault. The morning after the apparent shootdown of a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet over Ukraine (once again, why was a commercial airliner routed over a war zone?) the warmongers are out with a vengeance in building their ongoing case against Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Putin's grave offenses have been (1) presiding over a government that dared to save NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden from a US torture chamber (2) intervening to stop what would have been a devastating air attack on the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad who was blamed for a to this day unsolved use of sarin gas on civilians (3) working to facilitate an end to economic sanctions against Iran for their alleged nuclear program (4) not accepting the illegally installed US backed, neo-Nazi infested coup in Ukraine (5) refusing to bow to the demands of crazy old Uncle Scam therefore risking becoming an example of one who successfully stands up to a bully.

The lurid tales that have been churned out of the propaganda machine like so many sausage links made of tainted rat meat have duped already stupid and fear-addled Americans into accepting that Putin is some malevolent evil force out of a Marvel comics series and now with the downed airliner - the earthly manifestation of Mephistopheles himself. Sadly it will be gobbled up by the American common folk who will ultimately be the ones who foot the bill for the coming disaster of our warped foreign policy - just like they always do.

Leading point for the wrapping of the blame of the downing of MH-17 around the Russian leader's neck like the noose applied before the lynching are the usual vermin and scum that have risen to the apex of the rotten to the core and now bordering on biblical evil US government that lives high in the kingdom of Washington. Vice President Joe Biden rapidly identified the air disaster as a missile attack as though he already knew the answer - the veep is hardly one who is unbiased in the Ukrainian matter given his son landed a plum job with the country's largest gas company - which he likely did. Old blood and guts, Senator John McCain was bellowing his usual bullshit and crying for war - has there ever been a stronger argument for euthanasia? But the deal was sealed when none other than Queen Hillary the Inevitable, our historic first woman president in waiting let it rip on the Charlie Rose show last night. As in the Bush era, the "facts" were being fixed around the policy and the policy as it was even before this primo excuse for a war of some type against Russia have always been preordained.

The war propaganda and campaign of relentless demonization will pick up today and escalate to a thundering and rousing, flag-wrapped crescendo by the time that the usual assortment of freaks, stooges and war criminals are rolled out for the Sunday morning "news" shows. The warmonger's gazette, The Washington Post is pounding the war drums loudly already as the sun rises on Friday from the neocon bunker of their editorial page with a call to arms "The world must know whose weapon destroyed a passenger plane" - which anyone who has seen what the monsters running the USA!, USA!, USA! since September 11, 2001 already knows. The reports from the illegitimate occupying government in Kiev are taken as gospel by the state-corporate media and the "proof" will assuredly be provided and be as damning as the aerial photos of Saddam's mobile chemical weapons labs. I excerpt from WAPO:

In recent days there has been abundant evidence of Russia stepping up supplies of heavy weapons to rebels in eastern Ukraine, including advanced anti-aircraft systems. The Kiev government reported that two of its military aircraft were shot down in the past week, either by separatists, Russian planes or batteries operating from across the border. On Thursday came a greater tragedy: the destruction of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet with 295 people aboard. Ukrainian authorities charged that it had been struck by a missile fired by a Russian-made surface-to-air battery supplied to Moscow’s Ukrainian proxies.

If the reports are confirmed, the Ukrainian separatists and their sponsors in Moscow will be responsible for a heinous crime. The United States and its allies must insist that those responsible be held accountable — including those in the Kremlin. [TRANSLATION: PUTIN]

First the word of "Ukranian authorities" and the "Kiev government" are not to be believed or trusted, this is a US installed puppet regime packed with thugs, crooks, fascists, neo-Nazis and led by a corrupt oligarch whose fondness for Hitlerian statements of total retaliation to avenge the deaths of military forces killed by anti-austerity, anti-fascist federalists defending against ethnic cleansing indicated a depth of moral depravity that makes it easy to see why the US State Department and Obama regime back him. The WAPO screed goes on:

The White House continues to avoid measures that could inflict crushing damage on the Russian financial system and force Mr. Putin and the elites around him to choose between aggression in Ukraine and Russia’s economic future. Wednesday’s measures stop two banks from obtaining long-term debt financing in U.S. markets, but the treasury has not excluded those banks from the financial system nor taken measures against the largest banks. Though its bank was sanctioned, the energy operations of Gazprom, Russia’s giant, remain untouched.

Even before the tragic loss of the Malaysian plane, it ought to have been clear to the West that Russia’s aggression in Ukraine could not be overlooked or wished away. It is both criminal and intolerable and should be treated accordingly.

That is about as obvious a call to arms- even if it results in a civilization destroying nuclear war - as it gets but this is the depth of the systemic rot in our now fully amok and globally despised empire. The very least that the WAPO is calling for seems to be the dropping of what has been referred to as the "financial neutron bomb" which would in essence be an act of war. But war is what the establishment needs and has refashioned US society around as a the cornerstone for our continued existence - it is lucrative, keeps the bewildered herd in line with the ongoing worship of the flag and the state and most of all it is damned good politics in the permanent election cycle.

The feeding frenzy begins but the obvious blame lies with Obama himself because had he not presided over the original sin of the coup d'etat in Kiev then there would have been no war zone and the passengers of MH-17 would be alive today. The emperor not only has blood on his hands but it would not be a surprise if he bathes in it on a daily basis.

Here We Go Again: Another Syria Chemical Weapons Tale

MORE WAR PORN TO PUSH FOR US ATTACK ON SYRIA

It is hard not to be completely distracted by the endless torrent of war propaganda over Ukraine and getting Americans whipped up into a bloody frenzy of hatred towards Russia and Vladimir Putin but there is another lurid tale of Syrian gas attacks on civilians making the rounds this week. While it is nowhere near as intense an effort to promote lies upon which to base the long-desired apple of the neocon's eye that is regime change in Damascus as we saw back last summer when Obama and his incredible shrinking Secretary of State John Kerry were trying to close the deal for yet another regime change in the Middle East.

There aren't those war porn videos of the poor children who were allegedly the victims of the use of chemical weapons by the "New Hitler" of the week Bashar al-Assad on civilians that the missing airplane network CNN looped over and over again in excruciating detail. The sheer cynicism of the Obama regime, one that has always been built upon a foundation of horseshit was laid bare for all to see before Putin saved the day, an act that was a terminal blow to the embedded neoconservatives and according to journalist Robert Parry over at the great Consortium News may have been - along with the desire to sink the P5+1 Iran talks - the impetus for the unfolding debacle in Kiev. This certainly resonates with the sort of tactics that the Leo Strauss inspired Machiavellian masturbators resort to in selling their illegal wars of aggression.

Despite the US war machine having never been able to definitively prove that the Sarin used in Ghouta indeed came from Assad's government and despite the account that was too volcanic to mention in the poisoned state-corporate media in The Homeland by Seymour Hersh that writes of a potential false flag Turkish involvement the neocons are flogging the fairy tales about gas attacks anew. The latest offering from the mighty megaphones of living high on the hog US war propagandists and their NATO allies is the claim that chlorine gas has been used nine times since February. According to a story in The Guardian (also with an image of suffering children as a sales tactic):

The global body supervising the surrender of Syria's chemical weapons is to investigate fresh claims that a less dangerous – but still lethal – chlorine gas has been used in recent attacks on opposition areas.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has announced it will investigate allegations that chlorine has been used at least nine times since February, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds more.

The move follows intensive lobbying from the US and France who have both indicated in the past fortnight that they believe the Syrian government has been responsible for the attacks.

Note the hypocrisy in that now the neocons are throwing in with those previously mocked and detested "cheese eating surrender monkeys" in Paris whose failure to support Bush-Cheney's military misadventures resulted in much outrage back in 2003. Such stupid behavior as the US House of Representatives (as big a collection of childish assholes that exists today) to rename french fries as freedom fries and a scary proposal by Florida Republican Ginny Brown-Waite who represents the textbook example for gerrymandered districts in Florida's 5th to exhume the bodies of the American war dead who were killed during the "good war" at Normandy and returning them home for burial as a retaliatory gesture to the "ungrateful French" are now forgotten but in attention deficit America a decade may as well be eternity.

Just as forgotten as the lessons of the ruinous - although massively profitable - war in Iraq and to a lesser degree the one in Afghanistan that Obama adopted like a Portuguese water dog puppy. With everything now focused on the support of the coup regime in Ukraine and the ongoing Russia bashing don't discount the ability of the neocons to work to slide a military attack on Syria under the radar. This piece by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the US State Department per her byline at a website Project Syndicate is indicative of the sorty of deranged thinking that has helped to punch the ticket of this once great country towards damnation. I excerpt from the following "Stopping Russia Starts in Syria":

The solution to the crisis in Ukraine lies in part in Syria. It is time for US President Barack Obama to demonstrate that he can order the offensive use of force in circumstances other than secret drone attacks or covert operations. The result will change the strategic calculus not only in Damascus, but also in Moscow, not to mention Beijing and Tokyo.

Many argue that Obama’s climb-down from his threatened missile strikes against Syria last August emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to annex Crimea. But it is more likely that Putin acted for domestic reasons – to distract Russians’ attention from their country’s failing economy and to salve the humiliation of watching pro-European demonstrators oust the Ukrainian government he backed.

Regardless of Putin’s initial motivations, he is now operating in an environment in which he is quite certain of the parameters of play. He is weighing the value of further dismemberment of Ukraine, with some pieces either joining Russia or becoming Russian vassal states, against the pain of much stronger and more comprehensive economic sanctions. Western use of force, other than to send arms to a fairly hapless Ukrainian army, is not part of the equation.

That is a problem. In the case of Syria, the US, the world’s largest and most flexible military power, has chosen to negotiate with its hands tied behind its back for more than three years. This is no less of a mistake in the case of Russia, with a leader like Putin who measures himself and his fellow leaders in terms of crude machismo.

It is time to change Putin’s calculations, and Syria is the place to do it. Through a combination of mortars that shatter entire city quarters, starvation, hypothermia, and now barrel bombs that spray nails and shrapnel indiscriminately, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have seized the advantage. Slowly but surely, the government is reclaiming rebel-held territory.

Realist” foreign policy analysts openly describe Assad as the lesser evil compared to the Al Qaeda-affiliated members of the opposition; others see an advantage in letting all sides fight it out, tying one another down for years. Moreover, the Syrian government does appear to be slowly giving up its chemical weapons, as it agreed last September to do.

 The problem is that if Assad continues to believe that he can do anything to his people except kill them with chemicals, he will exterminate his opponents, slaughtering everyone he captures and punishing entire communities, just as his father, Hafez al-Assad, massacred the residents of Hama in 1982. He has demonstrated repeatedly that he is cut from the same ruthless cloth.

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, Assad has fanned fears of what Sunni opposition forces might do to the Alawites, Druze, Christians and other minorities if they won. But we need not speculate about Assad’s behavior. We have seen enough.

 A US strike against the Syrian government now would change the entire dynamic. It would either force the regime back to the negotiating table with a genuine intention of reaching a settlement, or at least make it clear that Assad will not have a free hand in re-establishing his rule.

Jesus Christ.. Colonel Kurtz has reached the end of the river here. Ms. Slaughter (how apropos a name) is indicative of the thinking that has set this country on the road to historical damnation if not the compilation of a body count that in the end would exceed that of all of the 'great" mass murderers of history driven by an insane ideology and that it is now pretty much the conventional wisdom bodes very ill for all of the subjects of the Empire as well as humanity itself.

Kerry to Kiev as Neocon Washington Post Wails for War

Secretary of State John Kerry, fresh off of his whirlwind tour of the Sunday morning lie factories is heading to Kiev to bolster the illegitimate western backed government that just toppled democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych. Kerry has been dispatched with a mandate from the narcissist in chief Barack Obama to ensure that the loathed Russian leader Vladimir Putin is made to lick the star-spangled jackboots of Uncle Sam for his recalcitrance in saving Snowden from one of Obama’s torture black sites and then intervening to stop the war on Syria. The Skull and Bones pedigreed Kerry, with his phony Vietnam war hero mystique and his great wealth from marrying into the Heinz Ketchup family fortune has a full head of steam and the wind in his sails as he will slither into the Kiev HQ of the chosen new boss whose reign is as bogus as those “freedom fighters” that the U.S. state media likes to tout as heroes of democracy while conveniently ignoring that they are chock a block with right-wing extremists, fascists and full blown neo-Nazis.

The entire corrupt domestic media has Kerry’s back – at least as long as his extended stammering about such horseshit as “democracy” and accusing Putin of being the second coming of Satan doesn’t cut into their 24/7 gavel to gavel coverage of the Oscar Pistorious trial. Nowhere is the propaganda of a long ago discredited media spewed forth like so much electronic manure as it is at the Neocon beacon of lies and jingoism that is The Washington Post. Whatever hope that the acquisition of the one-time crown jewel of Operation  Mockingbird by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos would result in a giant enema nozzle being inserted into the building – preferably at the foot of the desk of the as prolific as she is insipid Jennifer Rubin and the bulb being given a good hard squeeze was a false one. But in the age of Obama one is by now used to false hope as well as chump change. The WaPo was in rare form today as it published a call to arms for WW III against the much demonized Putin by its editorial board.

The piece, entitled “President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy” is such an incredible piece of bullshit that any decent managing editor would have fed it directly into the shredder – I only excerpt the lead in as an example of its complete and abject dishonesty:

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”

The reference to Kerry’s comparison to the invasion of Ukraine along with the stunning omission that the United States of America and the George W. Bush administration did EXACTLY this by attacking, invading and occupying Iraq back in 2003. Granted Americans in general really don’t bother reading anything other than the sports sections or the funnies and have the attention span of attention deficit-disorder afflicted gnats but Jesus Christ – that is in and of itself not only a national embarrassment but exhibit A in why the blogosphere and alternative media has been kicking the shit out of consolidated, corporate and state megaphones like the Post.

Also in the WaPo was a vomit inducing manifesto by career lickspittle David Ignatius very imaginatively entitled “Putin’s error in Ukraine is the kind that leads to catastrophe” which if you can manage to get through the first paragraph of this substitute for toilet tissue it is obvious that it is cribbed from centrally distributed talking points notably for the term “revanchist” which is not exactly one that is commonly used. The think tanks have been working overtime to provide scripts for warfare state parrots like Ignatius and his ilk:

Napoleon is said to have cautioned during an 1805 battle: “When the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him.” The citation is also sometimes rendered as “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Whatever the precise wording, the admonition is a useful starting point for thinking about the Ukraine situation.

Vladimir Putin has made a mistake invading Crimea, escalating a crisis for Russia that has been brewing for many months. It might have been beneficial if President Obama could have dissuaded him from this error. But Putin’s move into Crimea appeared to spring from a deeper misjudgment about the reversibility of the process that led to the breakup of Soviet Union in 1991. The further Russia wades into this revanchist strategy, the worse its troubles will become.

I will give Ignatius some credit though in that he did not compare Putin to “The New Hitler” but "revanchist" is a dead giveaway just as the references to "jitters" in reports on our dismal and doomed economy are. 

The WaPo also trotted out the borderline cadaver that is the insane career anti-Russian bigot Zbigniew Brzezinski (Z-BIG) – author of "The Grand Chessboard" as well as the man whose brilliant idea to sucker the hated Russians into Afghanistan as their “Vietnam” during the 1980’s led to the arming of Islamic fanatics including one Osama bin Laden and we all know how that turned out. Why the fuck that these people are given any credibility as “experts” at anything but destroying America is illustrative of how every single institution in this once great country has been polluted over the past forty or fifty years. I excerpt the following from Z-BIG’s asininely over the top “What is to be done? Putin’s aggression in Ukraine needs a response”:

 Regarding the Russian aggression against Ukraine, much depends on what Vladi­mir Putin does next. But what Putin does depends on not only his calculation of the likely NATO (and especially the U.S.) response but also his estimate of how fiercely the Ukrainian people would respond to any further escalation by Russia. And, to complete the circle, the Ukrainian response would be influenced by citizens’ reaction to any further repetition of Putin’s Crimean aggression and by whether the nation believes that the United States and NATO are truly supportive.

Putin’s thuggish tactics in seizing Crimea offer some hints regarding his planning. He knew in advance that his thinly camouflaged invasion would meet with popular support from the Russian majority in Crimea. He was not sure how the thin and light Ukrainian military units stationed there would react, so he went in masked like a Mafia gangster. In the event of serious Ukrainian resistance, he could disown the initiative and pull back.

His initial success may tempt him to repeat that performance more directly in the far eastern provinces of Ukraine proper. If successful, the conclusive third phase could then be directed, through a combination of political unrest and increasingly overt use of Russian forces, to overthrow the government in Kiev. The result would thus be similar to the two phases of Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland after Munich in 1938 and the final occupation of Prague and Czechoslovakia in early 1939.

Why is it that these Goebbels wannabes never apply their sick and dishonest Hitler and Nazi analogies to themselves?

That was a jeremiad befitting of Mein Kampf as a rallying cry to destroy an enemy that only truly exists within the deranged psyches of those most likely to lead the planet into a nuclear cataclysm and what the Christian Zionist zealots who buy into all of the insanity call the “end times” which they covet. Not that it matters to them that Jesus is NOT coming back and all of us – saints and sinners, believers and non-believers, liberals and conservatives and us and them are going to be incinerated. The unlucky ones will be left wander the nuclear wasteland like the walkers in "The Walking Dead" or any of those other very popular zombie-apocalypse flicks but it will really be like “The Road” only with iPads that no longer function due to the busting back to the stone age punishment inflicted upon us all by those choked with hubris, megalomania and the presstitutes and propaganda mills that keep them in power.

Like his buddy Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski should have long ago been euthanized or parked in an insane asylum where he could deliver his diatribes to the fellow lunatics or the rubber walls of the padded room in which he belongs but as such practices are not tolerated in a ‘civilized’ society the very least that could be expected is that he be exiled to a place like Stormfront I know that the Pox on the Potomac was hit by a winter snowstorm again today giving the sucklers and chiselers of our bloated authoritarian government yet another day off to sit around in their jammies and deliver their silly but dangerous babble on the internet but Bezos semi-officially became our own version of Julius Steicher today.

My God, if the man has any principles whatsoever he would brave the weather and fire the entire sordid lot tomorrow morning just as the wretched Obama should do in giving Kerry his pink slip – what a national embarrassment this stammering buffoon has become - it becomes increasingly evident why he got his ass kicked by Bush in 2004.

Are Syrian Barrel Bombs the New Sarin?

Percolating heavily for the first time in months the state-corporate media is beginning to produce more tales of dead children in Syria, still more alleged victims of the Assad regime.  The latest horror stories from the abattoir relate to some truly nasty munitions – barrel bombs – that have been being dropped on populated areas by what are reported to be government helicopters. The bombs, which are described as improvised explosive devices being barrels or barrel shaped containers packed with explosives and shrapnel have largely been used in the city of Aleppo and are capable of causing horrific damage, this is especially so given the presence of the shrapnel within. There has been much reportage of late over the mounting death toll courtesy of the barrel bombs and look for it to continue as the neocons, war freaks and their media operatives will continue to try to package a relaunch of the justification for U.S. intervention in Syria. They nearly pulled it off with the great chemical weapons scam of 2013, Barry was preaching war to the people and were it not for an inconvenient case of diarrhea of the mouth from his Secretary of State allowing Russian leader Vladimir Putin to intervene we would now be mired in the midst of an increasingly brutal civil war.

The war machine has continued to agitate for action in Syria goaded along by the Saudis and silent partner Israel (which is more preoccupied with starting another war in Iran) and the ongoing killing of civilians will provide much fodder in the coming weeks. But it is just more of the usual propaganda and warmongering, nothing is more able to influence American hearts and minds to support foreign interventions in a civil war that is none of our business like piles of little dead bodies as American tykes are gleefully awaiting Santa. The carnage factor this time is far more graphic than the endless loop of those twitching, dying Syrian children, the victims of a still mysterious sarin gas attack in Ghouta that nearly convinced the sheeple to bleat their consent for yet another Middle Eastern intervention.  While the narrative of the little severed limbs and lives cut short is indeed tragic, even more so when it is cynically pushed to send more people to die there is the obvious lack of context, the big lie of omission. This being of course that the poor little innocent children in Iraq who fell victims to U.S. bombs and the fallout from the sectarian warfare that was set off when President George W. Bush and his gaggle of neocon war criminals  chose to attack and invade a country that did nothing to us are always left out. They are just as dead as any victims of Syrian barrel bombs yet are merely “collateral damage”, acceptable victims of the righteous cause of making the world safe for McDonalds and Wal-Mart.

While Syria has been relegated to the back burner as the treasonous cabal of U.S. Senators frantically work to sabotage the P5+1 Iran peace talks it has never truly been off of the radar for the war machine. The situation continues to deteriorate as those freedom fighting rebels that U.S. officials the likes of blood thirsty Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham and others so advocated for have increasingly come to be dominated by serious Islamist fanatics looking to go medieval on Assad’s ass. When considering that those type of savages differ very little from the barbaric hoards that inflicted unspeakable cruelty on their victims centuries ago it would be difficult to not understand why the Assad regime is becoming increasingly desperate to destroy them. With the rebel forces dug deeply into densely populated areas such as Aleppo they also should bear a fair share of the blame for the mounting death toll of children but you won't see that sort of moral equivalence pointed out by the corrupt media in this country which long ago ensured that the devil horns would be affixed to President Bashar al Assad alone. In yet another aspect of the ridiculous Time Magazine "Person of the Year" award that was given to the Pope rather than former government contractor Booz-Allen employee turned NSA whistleblower it was Assad who was also a runner up and probably would have adorned the cover had El Presidente and Secretary of Skull and Bones Kerry been able to have their war in September. Assad is also vilified in the 'iiberal' New Republic as "Madman of the Year". 

War is always brutal, particularly civil wars and even more so when ancient religious and ethnic tensions are exploited by foreign inciters of violence with their own agendas. While the barrel bombings don’t rise to the level of bullshit that the sarin gas attacks did, simply because it was a full blown lie that the rebel forces did not possess the capability to concoct the toxic brew they still are going to be used very soon, likely the weekend after Christmas has passed via the Sunday morning bloviation circuit to gin up the case for U.S. entry into another conflict where we have zero compelling national interest. There will inevitably be calls for the military action that is most dear to liberals, humanitarian interventions coming in the new year to Sudan as well, Obama is already planting the seeds for U.S. action and rebels there reportedly fired on U.S. aircraft over the weekend. There are also now reports of the discovery of mass graves. 

All they want for Christmas is war.