Clowns

In what has to be the quote of the day on the internet, Richard Fernandez comments on allowing Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Chuck Hagel to spearhead the President's lose-lose strategy in Syria:

To go to war under these leaders would be like undertaking to climb K2 with a carload of clowns.

With each passing day, it looks more likely that anti-War liberal Democrats will support Barack Obama, and in a show of breathtaking hypocrisy, sacrifice their principles on the alter of party loyalty. For example, Senators Ed Markey and Liz Warren from Massachusetts, left-wing antiwar adherents throughout all of the past dealings, are waffling on the Syria vote. Markey, in a true profile in courage, voted "present" in committee hearings yesterday. Impressive!

And the GOP doesn't look much better. John McCain is so caught up in combating "humanitarian abuses" that he doesn't much seem to care about a lose-lose outcome, not to mention the unintended consequences of any military action. John Boehner says he'll support Obama's lose-lose strategy, wrapping himself in protecting the prestige of the United States, even though the President's actions over the past five years have done so much damage to our international standing that a few hundred Tomahawk will do little to correct matters.

I'd like to think that in the end, the Congress will vote down the President on this matter. But when I read left-leaning commentators like Donna Brazile, Richard Cohen, Nick Kristof and others twist logic and their principles to voice support for this idiocy, I have to wonder.

In the mid-1800s, Alfred Lord Tennyson said: "By blood a king, in heart a clown." To paraphrase, "By election a president, in policy a clown."

Update (5 Sep 2013):

You'd think that the President's denial the he and he alone set the "red Line" would get at least a bit of media scrutiny in the days following that mendacious claim. James Taranto follows up:

The fierce watchdogs of the press, confronted with this brazen falsehood, show themselves once again to be Obama's pet hamsters. Instead of giving a "pants on fire" rating, PolitiFact.com's Jon Greenberg claims Obama was "reframing comments rather than denying them." Greenberg can't even say the statement is half true, so he withholds a rating altogether. Peter Baker of the New York Times has his own euphemisms, writing that Obama was "citing longstanding international norms" and "trying to break out of his isolation." The funniest dodges come from Shawna Thomas of NBC News, who on Twitter calls Obama's whopper "a definite change in tone" and an attempt "to unilaterally widen the circle of responsibility."

That last one is priceless. Next time someone accuses you of trying to weasel out of a commitment, say you're just trying to widen the circle of responsibility.