I dunno, people, I think we must come to the sad conclusion that the entire executive branch of the most powerful country on earth is populated by fools - Kerry yesterday doubled down with great specificity on how what they're planning for Syria will be short and theatrical, a gesture, a show of limited, narrow power - these redoubtable idiots seem to have no conception of reality that actual escalation must be implied in a threat otherwise the threat has no meaning - nor do they seem to have any understanding of war and how, once you begin hostilities, they take on a logic of their own and you cannot simply walk away from that logic without doing great harm to your reputation as a power to be respected. I think congress has no choice but to vote 'no' on the resolution because incompetence like this cannot be endorsed - in short, endorsing such foolishness would do much more harm to the country than a rejection of the president is like to do.
So the question becomes, if congress does turn him down, will Obama go ahead regardless? He's put himself in quite a bind because he has maintained all along that he has the right under the War Powers Act to do so and he and his catamites have built their flimsy case on the idea that a failure to act would be immoral - therefore he can't simply blame all this unconscionable immorality on congress should he not act. But then he's going to have another vexing problem: if congress says no it's a virtual certainty that Russia and China, who both have warships in the Mediterranean now, would argue vociferously that any action would be both illegal as an international matter and a US constitutional one - a difficult argument to simply ignore - but here's the problem, if Obama decides to stand down with Russian and Chinese naval forces glowering nearby it's not going to look like he backed down because he no longer had legitimacy to act, he will look like he backed down in the face of Russian and Chinese power - that's a pretty awful message to be sending. Yep, he's put himself, the congress and the whole bloody country in quite a bind here.
