Thumbtack observations

Since losing my internet access at home a week ago, I just don't have the time or the resources to do the necessary research that a typical post requires. Still, I'd like to keep my hand in and not totally disappear into that not-so-good night.

What follows is mainly commentary off the top of my head, moreso of an opinion piece than usual.

Firstly, it bothers me that Obama is cynically jumping on this pro-democracy bandwagon that's caught fire and sent barreling toward presidential palaces all over the Middle East and Northern Africa. What's especially galling is that the Obama administration has found another way to continue the Bush administration's ruinous foreign policy by continuing to fund, according to Wikileaks, through the State Department anti-government propaganda in Syria.

On the face of it, opposing the autocratic rule of a tyrant such as Bashar al-Assad, whose thugs have killed scores of Syrian protesters, may look like a valiant, proper and moral position. But let's remember that the right wing of our government has always had a throbbing, oozing hardon for al-Assad ever since the Iraq War began. The GOP's erection for regime change just got harder when the false meme started circulating that Saddam's phantom menace of WMD were never found because they'd been spirited away to Syria.

And let's not forget how berserk the Republican White House went when Nancy Pelosi went with a bipartisan delegation in 2007 to talk to Bashar al-Assad (despite the GOP meeting with the same man at around the same time.).

Obama secretly supporting this, until now, underreported pro-democracy movement in Syria is infinitely more dangerous because now our latest round of rash adventurism is brilliantly masqueraded by popular consensus and makes the US look like the democracy-givers that the Bush administration could never be.

So why the continuance of secret financing? And doesn't the current junta in the White House reads its history? If they did, they'll know that, our own history aside, it's always better to let the indigenous people bring about their own regime change without cynical ulterior motives by larger, more powerful countries meddling in their affairs.

Besides, financing TV stations to disseminate propaganda is one of the many things the Bush administration did in both Iraq and here at home and continued by the Obama administration.

This propaganda continues regarding our so-called success in Afghanistan and alleged non-involvement in Libya even as we're openly bombing their country and supporting anti-government forces that just happen to be largely made up of Libyan insurgents who had engaged and killed our troops in Iraq four years ago.

It seems to me that one of the biggest failings today of the MSM not to mention the liberal movement (such as it is) is the unwillingness and/or the inability to clearly and forcefully articulate a return to our isolationist policy of a century ago.