Since when did a democratically elected official’s oath in the House and Senate become, “I will do what I want in your best interests even if you voters don’t understand how good this is for you?”
We have elected representatives from Virginia and across the nation who are telling us they are going to disregard what we’re telling them – and vote to attack Syria anyhow.
They treat us like children to whom they’re administering castor oil. Continue reading
Syrian dead – from nerve gas?
Right now we have elected officials in the U.S. Congress from both parties denouncing any military involvement in Syria.
The public is against us getting involved in this brutal civil war.
President Barack Obama, however, wants to travel a different road.
The President’s avowed reason to force a “limited” aerial attack against Syria, notwithstanding the congressional and public resistance, is because the Syrian government in a civil war that has tallied more than 100,000 dead has recently used chemical weapons killing a thousand or more innocent women and children.
President Obama’s advisers believe the President shall suffer “a credibility gap” if he doesn’t act, to “punish” Syria for using chemical weapons since the President told Syria a year ago, “not to do it – or else.”
There is no international treaty or law against killing women and children in war.
But we say we care if it happens with chemical weapons.
We have no problem if either side in Syria blows up women and children with bombs and bullets. Continue reading
Uncle Charles Flannery and the author
I remember as if it were yesterday my Mom crying, a soulful wound torn open upon hearing that my Dad’s brother, Charles, died of internal bleeding because years earlier he’d been shot in World War II.
President Woodrow Wilson’s promise that World War I was the war to end all wars didn’t prevent World War II.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in WWII, said, “There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”
We could therefore erect no finer memorial to our war dead than to rededicate our nation to peace.
Eisenhower, in his farewell address in 1960, told the nation, “We must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.” It is past time for us to reconsider his advice.
Our wars since World War II have been about property – the differences by and between communism, socialism and capitalism. Also about ethnicity – over nationality, color, religion and region.
The nation state now caught in the congressional and executive cross-hairs is Syria.
We insist our wars are honorable because we are fighting for individual freedom but those we would “save” all too often recoil at the definition of “freedom” we seek to impose. Continue reading