SIGH OF RELIEF

That President Obama would probably have lost the vote on his Syria plan even in the absence of outside interference says something about him as a planner.  That he couldn't get his wife and daughters behind it says something about him as a persuader.

When an American president advocates violence in brief, simplistic, and moralistic terms, you know we've got trouble.

But as soon as those far-sighted statesmen Vlad "The Impaler" Putin and Bashar "The Mad Gasser" Assad proposed putting Assad's poison gas under international control, the many in Congress who wanted to resist administration pressure had their excuse to do so and the plan had to be dropped.  Of course, we've been snookered.  If Assad isn't in power a year from now, it won't be thanks to us.  And if he is, you can figure that, despite Mr. Obama's threats, he'll still be sitting on that gas, while we will have lost our opportunity to strike at him; that's a souffle that wouldn't rise once, let alone twice.

Last time, I listed Elizabeth Warren among the war hawks.  That was because of something she said.  I see she was officially on the fence.  And I mentioned last time that Connecticut's Chris Murphy was the only young Democrat I could think of off-hand who's a reliable progressive.  Hawaii's appointed senator, Brian Schatz, also 40 and also against the attack, appears to be in that category, as well.  A Murphy-Schatz ticket in '16 would be too much to hope for.

Czar Putin is no friend to us or to democracy, but this time he had to do us a good turn in order to do us a bad one.  And our folly is assisting his geopolitical ambitions.

Putin isn't a sort who'd want to be confined by an ideology, but he seems to have decided that having one will keep his faction motivated.  So he has signed on to the unfortunate worldview of a 51-year-old "traditionalist" Russian philosopher named Alexander Dugin.  Picture at https://www.facebook.com/agdugin

Dugin is popular, especially among lovers of atavism.  He's anti-Western, pro-empire, pro-Orthodox Church, pro-collectivism (fond of both communism and fascism), and pro-"Russian soul".  He's either a fanatic or an opportunist, I figure most likely the latter.

Dugin is slightly reminiscent of Rasputin, except that he's less liberal and neither willing nor able to stop anyone's bleeding.

Dugin and Putin are bad news, together or apart.  Dugin may find that, once the tyrant has made it known that he agrees with you, disagreeing with him is a bad career move.

And we in America, though our next crisis will be upon us soon enough, can rejoice for the moment that we finally have a president too inept to get us into the needless war that he wants.