The President’s Remarks on Syria

I only have a couple of comments about the president’s address, most of which have nothing to do with Syria.

At one point he pointed at the images we’ve seen on YouTube and Facebook as evidence that a chemical weapon attack took place. Let me get the exact quote to make sure I got it right.

“No one disputes that chemical weapons were used in Syria. The world saw thousands of videos, cell phone pictures, and social media accounts from the attack, and humanitarian organizations told stories of hospitals packed with people who had symptoms of poison gas…”

The suggestion that what we see on videos, cell phone pictures, and social media accounts is in any way related to The Truth is incredibly offensive. The president suggesting that we should tune into social media to see what’s going on-that what’s on social media is an accurate portrayal of events in the world-is tantamount to information suppression. Have you seen all the crap on social media? All the memes that are dead wrong? Social media is mostly a tool for mass social engineering, and if our government is tuned into that, then woe be unto us. Even more woe than usually be unto us.

(To be fair, later he gave some more weighty evidence. But leading with social media evidence? What are we, teenagers?)

He emphasized the terrible nature of chemical weapons, and the terrible way that people die. “On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons, and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off-limits…” That reminded me of a comment I saw on The Daily Show, essentially saying that lingering, torturous death is unacceptable, but clean, painless death is fine. (Which is basically the rules of civilization as we’ve defined it, but it sounds kind of ironic when you spell it out like that.) And he conveniently left out that people killed with conventional weapons don’t always have clean, painless deaths.

I find it amusing that American troop involvement is always called “boots on the ground.” It’s never “ground forces” or “soldiers in theatre” or “land-based humanized weaponry.” Always “boots on the ground.” From the president and all of Congress, too. I guess it’s supposed to make them sound all macho and military-ish. When I hear it I always think that they could easily get around that promise by sending in troops wearing sandals or tennis shoes or wingtips.

Anyway, he seemed sincere and made good effort I guess, but I doubt anyone is going to be any more excited about attacking Syria than they were before. I’d be happy to let Russia disarm them. Although it could be a clever plan for Putin to get his hands on a handy stockpile of chemical weapons. Because he just looks shifty like that.