One can hope that Congress can actually act, can actually pass a resolution that would put meaningful limits on the president’s actions, although that’s probably too many “actuallys” and “meaningfuls” for two paragraphs on Congress and foreign policy. Congress much prefers letting the president take all responsibility for foreign affairs, and it’s expecting an awful lot to expect two houses, controlled by two different parties, to come up with an effective response to the president’s gambit. But it does at least give honest anti-war types a chance to drum up some explicit support for an explicit rejection of the president’s bid for a congressional endorsement of a free hand in the Middle East, which would be terrific.
One can hope that a few Democrats will drum up the nerve to tell Secretary of State John Kerry that he’s talking nonsense when he calls this a “Munich moment,” a truly disgusting comparison, as though he were expecting Assad to invade Poland. He also called the Syrian president “a two-bit dictator,” which I guess proves that John Kerry is a bad ass.
On the Republican side, the big shots are already bailing. Boehner and Cantor and Paul Ryan are falling in line while saying, of course, that the president has already screwed up big time, so that if things don’t work out perfectly, it’s all his fault.
So far, only Rand Paul has had the nerve to confront the president directly, saying explicitly that the U.S. should stay out of Syria. Matt Drudge is also calling out the president, and the Republicans who support him, but Rush Limbaugh, still the reigning champion of the right wing, seems to be bobbing and weaving on the issue, calling it all an Obama trick without explaining how he thinks Republicans in Congress should respond.
Obama is asking Congress to give him the plenary and arbitrary power he asserts he already has, the power to do whatever is “right” to defend the U.S., the power he is using to spy on virtually everyone in the country, to imprison truth-tellers like Chelsea Manning for decades for exposing American lies, and to harass and threaten journalists for doing their job. Obama exemplifies the authoritarian elitism that seems to be the order of the day in the U.S., from Michael “I am the law” Bloomsberg to Chris “don’t fuck with Jersey” Christie and Hillary “Madame President” Clinton. I don’t know why people insist on feeling so frightened, but they do, and they seem happy to vote for people who will tell them “if you knew what I knew you wouldn’t ask so many damn questions. Just stay in line and keep your mouth shut and you will be free.”
Afterwords
John Chait puts the wood to SecDef Chuck’s Hagel’s excruciatingly lame argument for U.S. involvement, which can be summarized as “chemical weapons … bad!” I used to think Chuck only looked stupid.
