172.10 - Clown Award: war hawks

Clown Award: war hawks

Now for our other regular feature, it's the Clown Award, given for meritorious stupidity

The Big Red Nose this week goes to the war hawks in Congress, exemplified by Senators John McPainInTheAss and Lindsey Grahamcracker.

They are eager, champing at the bit, straining at the lead, they want more war.

Rep. Paul Rantin' said on August 23 that the United States military needs to “finish [ISIS] off because we will either fight them here or we will fight them there,” even if that means deployment of ground troops to Syria or Iraq, which should not be “off the table.”

Sen. Grahamcracker, for his part, argued Monday that Obama “is derelict in his duties by not aggressively confronting ISIL wherever they reside, including Syria” because anything less than "attacking their safe haven in Syria" is "placing the American homeland at risk."

(Sidebar: Do you get creeped out the way I do whenever one of these bozos starts talking about the "homeland?" How did that militarist-hyper-nationalist term get popular?)

The Washington Post editorial board says the US needs to pull together a coalition of “Kurds in Iraq and Syria, Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq, the Iraqi government if it can become more inclusive, what is left of the Free Syrian Army,” put some "boots on the ground," and launch a war in the cross-border area of Iraq and Syria.

They're all-out for war, perhaps missing "the smell of napalm in the morning," all ready for the blood and gore and guts and veins in your teeth and eating dead burnt bodies and shrink, I wanna kill - but there is one thing they are not all out for: taking any responsibility.

For example, on August 26, Rep. Michael Turner blasted Obama as not having a “coordinated plan” to defeat ISIS. But asked whether he would support US airstrikes targeting ISIS in Syria, he avoided the question.

In fact, Politico reports that few lawmakers really, truly want to take a vote on military action so close to the November elections. But that is not the only reason: In 2013, a non-election year, many lawmakers were privately relieved when Obama dropped his request for Congressional authorization for strikes on Syria after support collapsed on Capitol Hill.

Robert Chesney, a professor at the University of Texas who specializes in national security law, said that “The preferred position for many in Congress is not to be on record one way or the other in this situation.”

I disagree: They want to "be on record," they want to "be on record" with tough talk and sweeping claims about the necessity of regional war and blather about "the homeland" and "fight them there or fight them here" and lots of macho-talk fear mongering. They just don't want to be on record in any way that involves them taking and responsibility.

They are, all of them, not just these two, they are without doubt, clowns.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/paul-ryan-doesnt-think-sending-troops-to-fight-is#r24r7n
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/time-kaine-congress-iraq-vote-110328.html?hp=l5
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/26/right_wing_hawks_want_another_war_make_them_vote_on_it/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM