Copyright © 2012 Creators Syndicate

So, amid the myriad of scandals that currently occupy by DC elite, the House of Representatives worked late into the night to vote once again to repeal Obamacare.

The press played this as another partisan attempt to poke at the President, a waste of time, a waste of effort, a waste of money.  The bill wasn’t going to go anywhere in the Senate, so why would House Republicans do this for the 37th time?

I think there are several good reasons.

1. First, this is a revenue bill, and should the Senate want to go to conference on a revenue bill, this gives them a vehicle to do that.
2. Second, Obamacare is still not very popular, and for those who currently have health insurance (which is about 80% of the country), Obamacare is going to become even more unpopular.  This might seem like a wasted effort now, but next year, vulnerable Democrats are going to wish that they voted a different way.
3. Third, it is not true that the House voted the same repeal 37 times.  This is the third time they have done a complete repeal.  The other 34 times they voted to defund parts of that bill.

Seven of those bills have actually been signed into law by the President.  For example, the President signed into law a repeal of the small business paperwork mandate, which was HR 4 last year.  HR 4348 ended the so-called Louisiana purchase, a payoff to the Senior Senator from Louisiana.  HR repealed the CLASS Act, which saved more than 6 billion.  HR 3630 slashed 5 billion from the so-called Obamacare slush fund.

These are not trivial savings.  A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you are saving some real money.

According to a Kaiser poll, only 1 in 3 voters believe that House Republican efforts to block implementation of Obamacare is a waste in time.  More than half think it is a good idea to continue to block the law so that it has less of an impact on taxpayers.

These are all good reasons to continue down this road to repeal.

That fact that the person at the IRS who was in charge of investigating Tea Party groups is now in charge of implementing Obamacare only makes this even better political fodder for the Republican Party.

Is this a wasted effort?

Only 2 Democrats voted with all of the Republicans to repeal Obamacare last night.  When Republicans choose next year to vote again to repeal Obamacare, we will see how many Democrats decide it is a wasted effort and how many Democrats decide to change their vote to protect their backsides.

According to Wikipedia:

“A whipping boy was a young boy who was assigned to a young prince and was punished when the prince misbehaved or fell behind in his schooling. Whipping boys were established in the English court during the monarchies of the 15th century and 16th centuries. They were created because of the idea of the divine right of kings, which stated that kings were appointed by God, and implied that no one but the king was worthy of punishing the king’s son. Since the king was rarely around to punish his son when necessary, tutors to the young prince found it extremely difficult to enforce rules or learning.”

As you all know, I have been reading the Game of Thrones series of books, and somewhere in volume 6 (or volume 5) there is a pretty graphic scene where the young king Tommen has a whipping boy who gets beat up pretty good.

That reminded me of the concept of the whipping boy, which seems to have been used to great effect by the Obama Administration in this whole IRS scandal.

Steven Miller has been fired for being the Acting Commissioner of the IRS.  As he himself pointed out in his exit press release, he was going to be leaving in a couple of weeks anyway, so the President seemingly flogged him with all of the damage administered by a wet noodle.

The President huffed and puffed last night when he claimed outrage at the abuses administered by the tax collecting agency.   And by making Mr. Miller his whipping boy, the President at the very least showed that he was capable of doing something, no matter how painless to the former government employee.

The left has been trying to make the case that the real culprit is not the IRS or the White House, but instead the Supreme Court.  After all, they were the ones that insisted that the First Amendment meant something and that citizens ought to have the right to petition their government or try to change their government through the electoral process unimpeded.

How dare conservative groups band together, organize like-minded citizens and form up in organizations that don’t pay taxes?

On the other hand, why should the IRS get involved in groups like the Tea Party? It seems to me that we have this all wrong.  It is not that these groups should qualify for tax-exempt status.  I don’t believe that they should be forced to apply at all.

If this is not a for-profit business, why do they need to file for a tax-payer identification number?  Why does the IRS have any control over what these citizen groups do or don’t do?

We are all asking the wrong questions here.  This is not about what the President knew and when he knew it.  This all about why do we have a tax code that is so big, so unwieldy, so dangerous, so chock-full of exemptions and other provisions as to make the average taxpayer’s head completely spin around in circles?

If we had a vastly simpler tax code, we wouldn’t have the IRS asking probing questions like “what books to you read”, or “where did you get your money”?    If we had a vastly simpler tax code, we wouldn’t have people who honestly make mistakes about how much they paid because they don’t understand the calculas needed to pay the right amount.  In a vastly simpler tax code, you wouldn’t need so many IRS agents who have so much power to inflict so much damage on the lives of ordinary Americans.

Republicans should use this IRS scandal as an excuse to get tax reform.  And the President should use tax reform as a way to move away from the scandal.

The President has a real crisis on his hands.  And as his old Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel put it, “never let a crisis go to waste.”

Twenty-nine years before the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., John Dean, then the White House counsel, sent a list of names to IRS Commissioner Johnnie Walters. On the list were names of enemies of the Nixon campaign that were to be investigated and audited and generally harassed by the tax-collecting agency.

That was among the revelations that came from the Watergate investigation, which eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon.

Some 40 years later, the Internal Revenue Service is once again in the news for targeting political enemies of the president. I would bet my bottom dollar that there is no evidence that the current president is involved directly in this latest scandal. President Obama is a sharp guy, and I doubt that he has the pathologies that drove Richard Nixon over the edge.

The scandal is not that Obama told the IRS commissioner to investigate the Tea Party because he wanted to win reelection. The scandal here is that relatively low-level bureaucrats can launch investigations on their own volition to harass citizens with whom they disagree politically. The scandal here is a government that is too big, has too much power and has lost the trust of the American people.

It was not a good week for Team Obama on the scandal front. The House Government Reform and Oversight Committee probed deeper into the attack on our Embassy personnel in Benghazi, Libya, and what it found were State Department employees who were flabbergasted at the assertion of United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice that the attack was caused by a video. No one mentions that one of the victims of that spin was the guy who produced the video. He was thrown in jail as if he had a hand in the planning of the attacks. But the video had nothing to do with the attack, and Rice appears to have lied about the linkage to further the administration’s political goals.

That’s the power of government these days. A government bureaucrat can throw you in jail to help promote a political agenda.

The government has a lot more power than it did in 1972, at the height of the Watergate shenanigans. Since 9/11, the security apparatus is much more intrusive. That can be both good and bad. The good comes when videos are compiled to capture the Boston bombers in three days. The bad comes when we give a bunch of bureaucrats the power to ruin lives at their own whim.

The government is going to become a much bigger power in the health industry, thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The government already is a huge player in the world of healthcare, especially with Medicare and Medicaid. ObamaCare is going to make the government the pre-dominant player, and I bet you a lot of Americans who currently have healthcare are not going to like it very much. It is no fun when the decision of a federal bureaucrat makes your health insurance premiums go up 75 percent to 100 percent.

Since 1972, the government has spent an inordinate amount of money and other resources fighting a war on drugs. As a result, we have the highest incarceration rate in the world. More Americans are in prison than in any other country — more than in China, than Russia, than Europe. And we like to call ourselves the land of the free.

Some people want to give the government even more power. If it were up to New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Americans wouldn’t be able own guns, drink Big Gulps, buy cigarettes or eat a decent donut. The media desperately wants the Senate to pass a gun control bill. Some conservatives want the government to check the immigration status of every worker and use drones to patrol from the border to Disneyland in California.

But the more power we give the government, the more power we give government bureaucrats. And when you give more power to government bureaucrats, they do things like launch audits of perceived political enemies.

The real scandal is big government.

When I worked for the Hammer, I told him point-blank it was unwise for him to lead the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

I explained to him that even if we could pass an impeachment resolution out of the House, a conviction would fail in the Senate because that required a two-thirds vote, and if he led the impeachment drive, it would automatically become a partisan event, making  a conviction impossible

Tom DeLay thanked me for my thoughts and said in no uncertain terms that Clinton’s actions were a moral stain on the Presidency and that he had to be made accountable.

As it turned out, we were both right.  By leading the impeachment drive, DeLay’s role turned it into a partisan affair, and while Republicans were able to get some articles passed through the House, the Senate never got close to convicting the President.

But by impeaching Clinton for having an affair in the Oval Office with one of his interns and then lying about it on national television, under oath, Mr. DeLay was able to put a permanent stain (no pun intended) on the popular President’s historic record.

Republicans recovered from impeachment, eventually, although it ended up taking down a Speaker and a man who would replace him.   Because the abuse of power was so specific to Clinton’s notorious sex drive, the impeachment controversy didn’t cause the country to suddenly lose faith in government or cause a tectonic split in the country.

Most people thought that while impeachment itself was probably an over-reach and definitely a complete waste of money and time, somebody other than his wife needed to send a message to the President that this time, he had really, really screwed up.   And that message was the impeachment/non-conviction two-step.

Impeachment is now coming up in terms of the various scandals that have beset the Obama Administration.  That is a different kettle of fish.

When Republicans drove the impeachment of Clinton, they were disgusted with the President’s conduct.  When Republicans talk impeachment of Obama, something far more sinister comes to mind.

Impeaching Obama won’t solve this country’s problems.  It won’t put us on a pathway of healing this country.  It won’t create jobs.  It will sharply divide this country.  It will convince people that the GOP is a party of racists.   And it will end the Republican Party as we know it, making it a minor regional party for at least a generation.

Barack Obama is not a very good President.  I think he is in over his head.  I have been consistent on that.  I don’t think he has the experience or the executive ability to drive consensus and get things done.

But Obama is not a Communist.  He is not anti-American.  He is not a racist.  He is not a Muslim.  He is not a trying to undermine this country.

The scandals that have befallen the Obama White House have brought echoes of Watergate for some.  The political enemies list.  The suppression of press freedom.  The lies.  The use of the IRS as a political cudgel.

And many of these scandals are bad news.   They deserve to be thoroughly investigated.  There should be an independent counsel appointed quickly, right after the Independent Counsel law is re-passed into law.

But let’s see where this all goes.  If this is a return to Nixon, it will be the Democrats who will take the lead.  And if the press gets bad enough, a politically- wounded Obama is better for Republicans than an impeachment drive led by Republicans.

So, to my Republican friends, I have a simple request.   Stop the impeachment talk.  It is not helpful.

It has been a good couple of weeks for conservative activists.

They have been able to take issues that they care deeply about and get the MSM (or main-stream media) to pay attention.

First, it was the trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell that caught fire.

I noticed on my Facebook page some of my “friends” kept talking about this Philadelphia doctor who killed babies after they were born.  They were complaining bitterly how the trial was not being covered by anybody outside of Philly.

And as it turned out, they were right.  The MSM didn’t cover the story for weeks, especially in Washington.  But late last month, a switch seemed to turn, and the GR888, even Morning Joe would talk about it on their roundtable discussions.

The Gosnell story was grisly and it also put the media (which is overwhelmingly pro-abortion rights) in the terrible position of having to defend the indefensible, which is the destruction of little babies.

But they had no choice.  The man was a monster, and what he did was so despicable, even the most ardent pro-abortion zealot had to admit that fact.

Some activists tried to spin this as a result of what would happen if abortion were made illegal, a curious defense of a barbaric process.  Killing viable babies should be illegal, no matter if they are born or not quite born.

Second, it was the Benghazi brouhaha.

I admit it.  I haven’t been paying much attention to this mini-scandal.  But the right-wing certainly has, as has the families of those who were killed in Libya.

Clearly, the White House put Susan Rice out on the talk shows to lie about what happened.  I don’t know why they did.  It seemed stupid to me.

Is this an impeachable offense?  I seriously doubt it.   There are much bigger fish to fry out there.  And Hillary Clinton did a pretty good job of defending herself several months ago, making Senate Republicans look pretty silly in the process.

But the Administration did more than lie.  They stifled dissent.  They muffled whistle-blowers.  They demoted career civil servants who wanted the truth to get out.

For what effect and for what reason?  I don’t know.  But clearly this deserves closer scrutiny.   And the MSM is on this story, because it might be good for ratings.

Third, it was the IRS targeting of conservative groups.

The right wing has been complaining about this for years.  The Tea Party groups, who often come off as paranoid and irrational, seemed paranoid and irrational about the Internal Revenue Service.

They complained loudly to the media, who largely ignored their complaints.

But it turns out that all of paranoid protesters were on to something.

The IRS was targeting them.

Amazing how stupid this Administration really is.

They run a very good campaign, those Obama folks.   Governing?  No so much.

The right wing is on a roll.

Maybe next week it will be revealed that the President was actually born in Canada, and not Hawaii.  Wouldn’t that be something?

At midnight on June 30, 1999, the statute that authorized the Independent Counsel Act expired.

That act had allowed Ken Star to investigate President Clinton.  It had also allowed several independent counsels to investigate Reagan appointees like Ed Meese, Ray Donavan and Samuel Pierce.

Lawrence Walsh investigated George H.W. Bush’s role in Iran-Contra and found the most advantageous time to release his report to maximize the advantage for the Democrats.

In other words, both Republicans and Democrats grew to hate the Office of Independent Counsel, and they both let it die a natural death.

The fact that it died in 1999 didn’t necessarily mean that the investigations ended.  In fact, Robert Ray continued his investigation of the Clinton Administration until 2001.

The Office of Special Counsel is not to be confused with the Department of Justice of Special Counsel.  One is an independent agency that protects Civil Service employees from unfair personnel practices.  The other is charged with investigating alleged misconduct in the Executive Branch.

The Office of Special Counsel is headed up by Carolyn Lerner.   Before I wrote this blog piece, I had never heard of her.   Her job is to protect whistle-blowers.  It is unclear if she is going to help protect Greg Hicks, who blew the whistle on the Benghazi debacle.

The Department of Justice’s brand of Special Counsel used to be headed up by Patrick Fitzgerald.  He helped put Scooter Libby in jail.  He also helped to put Rob Blagojevich in the slammer in his position as a US Attorney in Illinois.    I think he is the former Special Counsel, because he has a day job as a lawyer for one of the top private law firms in Chicago, although he is still listed as the guy running the Justice Department Office of Special Counsel.

I bet you there is no politics when you work for the top Chicago law firm in the country, especially with President Obama in the White House (he wrote ironically).

Eric Holder is the one who is supposed to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate corruption in the executive branch.   Holder is probably the most politically aggressive Attorney General since Robert Kennedy.   He is as loyal to Obama as John Mitchell was to Richard Nixon.

My guess is that he probably won’t launch much of an investigation into this brewing IRS scandal and if he does, it won’t amount to much.   But that would be a real disservice to the Federal Government in general and the White House specifically.   Only a real investigation will restore credibility to this Administration.

Perhaps the President didn’t know that his underlings were aggressively auditing Tea Party Groups and anybody who cared inordinately about the Constitution, but they were, and that requires an aggressive investigation from somebody who doesn’t have a vested interest in furthering the Obama agenda.

Mr. Holder should recuse himself, and have somebody with credibility within his Department (I wonder if there is anybody left), to name a real Special Counsel with real teeth.

Republicans in the House should pass a new Independent Counsel law and send it to the Senate.  And then Mitch McConnell should get Democrats to vote on that House-passed reauthorization.  Let’s see where Democrats really stand on the issue of protecting the Constitution.

Comprehensive immigration reform will get 75 votes in the Senate, making it harder for conservatives to kill it in the House.

The Senate Judiciary Committee easily brushed aside efforts from Republicans and Democrats to amend the base bill with potential poison pills, a sure sign that it has real momentum.  While the markup is scheduled to go on for three more weeks, the Committee should agree to just bring the whole bill, un-amended, to the Senate floor and dispense with the needless drama.

The meltdown at the Heritage Foundation has made it easier for main-stream conservatives to vote for the bill in the Upper Body.   A report by the conservative think-tank that put the cost of the Gang of Eight bill at 6.3 trillion dollars was condemned by every other right-leaning organization in Washington.  Revelations that the author of the study was linked to white-supremacist groups didn’t help the organization or other opponents of the bill.

A rare, if loose, coalition of business groups, labor, evangelical Christians, and immigration activists have banded together to urge passage of this comprehensive bill.   This coalition includes the conservative American Action Forum and the liberal Center for American Progress, the conservative Americans for Tax Reform and the liberal National Immigration Law Center, the Southern Baptists and Catholic Church, the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, conservative Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and liberal Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell.  If you are not part of this coalition, you are truly outside of the political mainstream.

That is where the Heritage Foundation finds itself today, which may explain why it is looking for a public relations firm to help with its damaged image.

Senators are looking for reasons to vote for this legislation, not against it.  Some are taking tough votes on other issues to please conservative constituencies because they want to have to enough wiggle room to vote for final passage of comprehensive immigration reform once it hits the Senate floor.

They probably don’t need to worry that much.

Passing comprehensive immigration reform is popular, according to the latest polls.  There is widespread acknowledgment that our immigration system is broken and needs to be fixed.  Even among the conservative base, there is reluctant acceptance that we aren’t going to kick 11 million undocumented workers out of the country, and if we did, our economy would completely collapse.

For Republicans, especially those who want to win national elections, getting this legislation to the President’s desk has become an urgent priority.   That’s why Haley Barbour, Karl Rove and Grover Norquist – all hard-nosed political strategists – all are putting their considerable political reputations on the line.

For Gang of Eight members like Jeff Flake, John McCain and Marco Rubio, there is a home-grown priority to final passage.  The demographics of their state are changing and changing rapidly.   They can see the writing on the wall for a GOP that is perceived to be hostile to Hispanic voters.   That future is not very bright.

Rubio and his team have been masterful.  They have confronted the critics, and proved to be tough enough debaters to put the haters back on their heels.  When Rubio can go toe to toe with Rush Limbaugh and come out the winner, you know he is ready for prime time.

For the President and for Democrats, they know that they have reached the end of the string.  Mr. Obama promised immigration reform when he first got elected to the White with huge majorities in the House and Senate.  But he chose to focus on other issues and he kicked his Hispanic base to the curb.

That part of his coalition is no longer content to wait and let the President do just about anything else other than play politics with the issue.   But Hispanic voters should remember that when push came to shove, it was Senate Republicans who pushed this legislation passed the finish line, not the President, who is quite rightly taking a back seat to Rubio and the Gang of Eight.

Big momentum will carry comprehensive immigration reform through the Senate.   Let’s hope there will be enough big mo’ to get it through the House.

Why did Susan Rice insist that this attack was caused by Muslims irate at some stupid video, instead of explaining that either she didn’t know or that it was clearly a terrorist attack?

I haven’t been paying too much attention to the Benghazi thing.

Fox News is fixated on it, but Fox gets fixated on a lot of things that don’t particularly interest me.

So I was pretty surprised when the Benghazi attacks resurfaced throughout the media yesterday and today, even on MSNBC.

I didn’t watch the hearing live (I have a day job, and I was busy doing that day job), but I saw the news reports later.

A couple of things interested me.

Bill Clinton’s impeachment lawyer was central to the Benghazi investigation.

Isn’t it amazing how the same people just keep showing up in the middle of all kinds of scandals.

Cheryl Mills, who led the former President’s defense when he was being impeached for having sex with an intern, had the job of telling potential whistle-blowers in the State Department to keep their fat mouths shut.

Apparently, she told these whistle-blowers to not cooperate with Congressional investigators.  It is not clear if she was the one who told these long-time public servants that they were going to be demoted or if that came later.

But it turns out, she is Hillary Clinton’s muscle.

I find that interesting.  Not fascinating, not earth-shattering, not impeachable, but interesting nonetheless.

Another thing interested me.

Why did Susan Rice insist that this attack was caused by Muslims irate at some stupid video, instead of explaining that either she didn’t know or that it was clearly a terrorist attack?

By being so clearly wrong, she lost herself a shot at being the Secretary of State.   And she embarrassed the administration and apparently really pissed off the eventual State Department Whistle-blower.

Why didn’t the White House send it either troops or military jets to stop the murder of our folks?  What took them so long?  Is there more to the story?

Was the Ambassador free-lancing when he was in Benghazi?

We still don’t know all of the answers here.

Darrell Issa is probably doing this investigation in part because he wants to knock Hillary Clinton down a peg or two.   But he also probably wants to get to the facts.

The more the Obama White House chooses to obfuscate, cover-up and squash the testimony of whistle-blowers, the better it is for Darrell Issa.

It’s always the cover-up that gets you.  Why don’t politicians ever learn that lesson?

The Castro boys’ mugshots.

Yesterday morning, Barbara Harrison was on the radio, promoting a story for the local NBC newscast, about a baby who was found in the garbage, barely breathing, who grew up to be a 23-year old college graduate who is doing great today, thanks to the person who found her in the plastic bag and the family that helped to raise her.

Later that day, came the revelations of three women who escaped from three brothers named Castro.  The women were held as sex slaves, repeatedly raped and beaten for more than a decade.

That was bad enough.  It turned out the three women would be beaten even more when they became pregnant, and that five of those pregnancies were ended, either before or after the kids were born.

I was pro-life before yesterday.

I am more pro-life today.

The Castro boys should get the death penalty for killing those kids.  I know those children were products of rape and I know that under some definitions, under the famous rape and incest provision, those kids shouldn’t be considered kids at all.  Under some definitions of the law, they should be considered merely fetuses.

I don’t care.  The Castro boys should be executed for killing those kids.

And the executions should be slow and painful.

I have gone wobbly on the death penalty in recent years.

I think our Justice system makes plenty of mistakes and some people are wrongly accused and wrongly convicted.  So, I think we need to rethink the death penalty.

But not in this case.  The Castro boys should be executed.   And they should be executed slowly and painfully.

The 23 year old college graduate who is doing quite well, thank you very much, is doing well because the scared girl who produced her didn’t have the heart to kill her.

That’s a good thing.

She didn’t get an abortion.  If she did, the 23-year old college student wouldn’t be a college graduate.  She would be just like the five poor “fetuses” who were killed by the Castro boys, the guys who deserve to be executed.   She would be dead.

That scared girl shouldn’t have put her baby in a plastic bag.  She should have dropped her off at a church or a hospital or anywhere else where she could be found and cared for.

If it weren’t for the grace of God, that 23-year old wouldn’t have been found 23 years ago.

We need to make it easier for pregnant girls to leave their babies in places that somebody will care for them.  There are plenty of people who desperately want little babies to adopt and to care for and to proudly attend their college graduations 23 years later.

Sadly, there are also a few people who want brutalize young women and then discard the product of those rapes as if nothing happened.

People who do that need to pay the ultimate price.  They are killing little children.  That is murder, pure and simple.

I usually don’t get on my soap box in social issues.  But yesterday helped to clarify one thing in my mind.  The Castro boys need to be executed.  Slowly and painfully.  It’s that simple.

I am not an expert on Mideast politics, and I have only been casually observing the growing conflagration in Syria.

There is a full-blown civil war engulfing that country for a while now, as Islamic extremists on one end and pro-democracy forces on the other try to topple Bashar Al-Assad’s Ba-ath Party in Damascus.

Assad is a member of the Alawite minority in Syria, so he is not necessarily an ally of either the Shia or Sunnis that make up most of the Arab world.  He has been an ally of the Persians in Iran, and his country is a safe haven for terrorist organizations like Hezbollah.

The Syrian Ba’ath Party, like Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party in Iraq, is socialist in nature.  Assad’s wife is an attractive woman who doesn’t cover herself up in a big black burka.   In other words, Assad is no fan of the Islamic extremists who make up Al Qaeda.

It seems to me that we have three options in Syria.

Option 1: Stay Out of It

We can let everybody continue to kill everybody in the country, without stepped in.  That is kind of what FDR did when the Germans invaded the Russians in 1941.   He didn’t invade France until he was pretty certain that the Germans and Russians had done a sufficient job of spilling a lot of each others blood.
If Al-Qaeda and Assad’s force wipe each other off the map, what does it concern us, some might ask.  Let them.

The problem with that scenario is that a lot of innocent people will get slaughtered, including some of our potential allies.

That is why John McCain is all about getting some arms to the rebels, even if some of those arms might fall in the wrong hands.  McCain doesn’t like it when it isn’t a fair fight.  And right now, it is not a fair fight.

Option 2: Support One Side or the Other

The second option is to go with some big-time support of one side or the other.  The question remains:  whom do we want to win?  Assad is a bad dude, but he is not an Islamic extremist, and he is not nearly as bad as Saddam Hussein.    Islamic extremists are bad news.  Period.  And we are still at war with them, and as the Boston bombing showed, they are still at war with us.

We need to be careful whom we support here.  I don’t think it is any way an easy decision.

Option 3: Cease-Fire

The third option is that we try to broker a cease-fire and then, eventually a peace agreement.

Working with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Turks and, yes, the Iranians, this might be complicated, but it might be for the best for everybody, including the Israelis.

The danger is letting this war to continue to expand is that it starts to spill out over the Golan Heights and into Israel.  I have been to the Heights and it is a very nice vantage point from which to peer into Syria, but it is also very, very close to key Israeli cities.

The danger is that if Assad feels even more threatened than he is today, he will do something desperate to unite his people, and by attacking Israel, he could very well do that.

Letting war linger is not the best option, in my opinion.

Arming the insurgents to let them expand the war is also not a good option.   We don’t know where those weapons may end up.

Sending our own troops in would make things worse, especially for us.  I don’t really even feel that comfortable trying to enforce a no-fly zone.  That puts our guys in harm’s way, and for what?

Getting some sort of peace agreement would be the preferred option.  Finding some exit strategy for Assad, where he could retire with his wife in comfort somewhere else might be the best way to move forward.

Obama doesn’t seem to be doing anything and that is probably why the Israelis have decided that they have to take matters in their own hands.

For the last 600 days, the President and his people have been saying two things.  First, they have continued to say that Assad’s days are numbered.   And second, they have warned that if he crosses a “red-line” on chemical weapons, well, then, Assad will be in big, big trouble.

Neither threat seems to carry much weight with the Ba’ath party leader.

Instead of throwing sticks and stones, perhaps Mr. Obama should try to broker a deal.   Of course, that would require some leadership from this President.

I won’t hold my breath.