Putin's aggression claims another sovereign state

Yes, this time he has attacked Syria.

You remember Syria, don't you? Three years ago the US, along with Britain and France and all those little thriving democracies in the Gulf, had declared that they recognize the Syrian National Coalition as the only legitimate representatives of the Syrian people.

The SNC was a great Hillary Clinton success story, comprised of Syrians who had spent the last 25 years in London or Paris or Washington.

Where are they now?

Still in London or Paris or Washington, I suppose. Hillary's Syrian revolution was stillborn.

In the interim, the evil Assad has invented barrel bombs, which, believe it or not, are exponentially more deadly than American Hellfire missiles or Paveway smart bombs. He has been dropping those barrel bombs on his own people, and all the Hellfire missiles and Paveway smart bombs at America's disposal have been unsuccessful in dissuading him from dropping more barrel bombs on his own people.

Installing democracy in Damascus has proven a much tougher assignment than anyone could have imagined.

Enter Bad Vlad.

The mainstream media in the Nations of Virtue are agog this evening at the cynical disregard for international law and human rights exhibited by Putin, as he joins the fight against the very terrorists that America and her allies have supposedly been raining Paveways and Hellfires upon for the past year.

WHAT DOES HE THINK HE'S DOING???

The Nations of Virtue were so close to defeating Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, and then Putin comes along and bombs the wretched fuckers?

What is that man thinking?

More meddling in Syria required to solve tragedy caused by our meddling in Syria - Toronto Star

Yup, everything is Assad's fault.

Nothing that's happened in Syria in the past four years can be blamed on Qatar or Saudi Arabia or Turkey, all of whom have connived to flood Syria with well-armed foreign jihadis, none of whom would lift a finger to so much as pick their nose without a green light from Washington.

Toronto Star veteran Mitch Potter offers this "news" story which informs the reader that a "no-fly" zone will keep Syrian toddlers safe from the evil Assad, who is responsible for them drowning in the Mediterranean etc.

Sorry Mitch; last time the Nations of Virtue played that card was in Libya.

How has that worked out for Libyans?

Harper's cynical manipulation of the Maher Arar file

That's a file open since at least 2002. In fact, CSIS obviously had a file on Mr. Arar well before that.


Mr. Arar was the Canadian dispatched to Syria for "questioning" by the US. Yup, that was back in the day when Assad was still a "good guy" and an ally of the Nations of Virtue. "Questioning" protocols have a little more elasticity in Syria than they do in the Nations of Virtue. "Question" a probable terrorist like Mr. Arar here in North America and all the bleeding heart soft-on-terror types will accuse you of torture.


So to keep our hands clean, we connived with the CIA to have Assad's thugs do the "questioning."


Mind you, that was while he was still a good guy.


There's nothing new in the Arar file, but at least thirteen years after the fact and ten years into the Harper regime, we suddenly get the news that the RCMP is charging a Syrian military officer in the torture of Maher Arar.


Could the timing of this announcement have anything to do with the fact that Harper is in the midst of a too-close-to-call election campaign?


What does the Harper gang get out of this?


A chance to silence Paul Martin, who's been a little too vocal in his support of Justin Trudeau. Martin was PM when the Arar fiasco originally unfolded.


A chance to change the focus from the faltering economy to the evil Assad.


A chance to pose yet again as the tough-on-terror, tough-on-crime strongman.


Are we expected to believe that the timing of these charges is a coincidence?

Obviously!


Otherwise, there would have to have been some pressure from the Harper gang to impact the fortuitous timing of this announcement from the RCMP, and that would be hugely inappropriate.

Maybe even illegal?!


You don't think anybody in the PMO would stoop that low, do you?

The many uses of ISIS

It has become abundantly clear that the ruling elites throughout the Nations of Virtue have seldom enjoyed such a useful enemy as ISIS.

In the first place, having hordes of disaffected Muslim youth abandon the Islamic ghettos of the great European cities to make jihad in Syria and Iraq serves as a valuable pressure-relief valve. Let them roam around in the deserts of the Levant slaughtering other Muslims, instead of making mischief in Stockholm and Marseilles.

The fear of what these radicalised youth could get up to when they come home in turn gives our rulers another lever with which to further tamp down our ever-eroding civil liberties. What are a few more limits on citizenship and freedom if they'll keep us safe from these fanatics?

Then there is the never-ending gravy train created by the need to train and provision forces that are willing to fight ISIS, because aside from dropping bombs and missiles from a safe distance, we're not. That creates vast wealth for myriad Western defence contractors, sub-contractors, consultants, and weapons manufacturers of all stripes.

ISIS also helps draw the eye away from the systemic human rights abuses among our allies in the region. What's another child shot dead in Gaza by the IDF when compared to this ISIS rampage? What's another dozen be-headings in Saudi Arabia when the blood-thirsty goons of ISIS be-head Western journalists?

And what a great excuse to send our warplanes into Syria to soften up that stubborn al-Assad, all in the name of supporting the moderate opposition, mind you!

Finally, the closer we can come to Iran's borders in the name of fighting ISIS, the shorter that final drive into Tehran will be!

By God, if fate had not provided us with such an extravagantly useful enemy, we would have had to invent them!

Top National Post columnist exposed as delusional by pot-addled blogger

The National Post is the flagship title in the Postmedia stable, a Canadian newspaper franchise that has been enjoying a death spiral for years.

Postmedia was a Lazarus play conjured up by a few money guys who bought the outstanding debt of Izzy Asper's crashed Canwest media empire for pennies on the dollar a few years ago. They stuck Paul Godfrey in the captains chair for a million a year, crossed their fingers, and hoped for the best.

Over these last few years Postmedia has tried all sorts of desperation strategies trying to stay afloat; they've sold off the corporate real estate, fired virtually everyone who gets a real paycheque, farmed out all their editing and production, and still they're haemorrhaging more red ink than the last wagon-builder in the age of the motorcar.

While rumour has it that virtually all copy across the Postmedia chain is now produced by a handful of unpaid interns working out of a Tim Hortons in Burlington, it looks like a few of the old stalwarts are still given real office space and actual column inches to carry forward the illusion of continuity in the pages of the crumbling media empire.

Which must be why we still get to read Jonathan Kay in the pages of the Post.

Jonathan's reactionary far-right opinions are often entertaining, and his fellowship with the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies gives you a heads-up on what to expect, but the sad truth of the matter is that Kay is far more often than not simply full of shit.

Here's a Kay editorial from over two years ago celebrating the imminent demise of Bashir al Assad. Not only was Assad a gonner, but he was going to take Hezbollah with him, and all these marvels were occurring "without the West firing a shot."

And here is yours truly calling the bullshit at the time.

So where should you go to get the no-shit truth on world affairs, the National Post or this pot-addled blogger?

So much stupidity, so little time...

Even though Francis Fukuyama authoritatively declared the final triumph of imbecility twenty-five years ago, it's impossible to open a newspaper without realizing that politicians the world over conduct themselves as though it's still "game-on."

There are at least a dozen stories that demand a good skewering today, and I fear I don't even know where to start.

Over in NATO's weakest link the wily but not-too-bright Erdogan is up a stump of his own making. Anti-Erdogan rioting has spread to multiple cities, and the media want us to believe that these "protests" are about resistance to a shopping mall! The flames are burning so bright that no less a moral arbiter than Noam Chomsky has been provoked to comment.

The protests in Turkey are the result of Erdogan's slow but steady progress down the Sharia highway to Shariaville. Today we ban booze, next week we ban Bon Jovi... it's a slippery slope, mark my words.

Had the glorious victory over the Alawite infidels next door played out the way his NATO betters convinced him it would, much could be forgiven. Alas, the wily-as-Erdogan but substantially brighter Assad refused to follow the script, and we know the rest. Odds are Assad will still be in power long after Erdogan takes a teaching post at Princeton.

Still in the "hoist by his own petard" department, the hapless Hollande has given an interview at France 24 which confirms our worst fears; the man has utterly no clue what he's doing. He wants to eliminate Islamic terrorists from Africa but arm them in Syria.

Makes perfect sense to me...

He'll be on the faculty of an Ivy League university not long after Erdogan.