Is Dithering Always Bad?: Trust and Verify and Vomit

By John Grant

The media didn’t waste time lining up US leaders to trash Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent op-ed in The New York Times. There was the expected outrage that such a “dictator” and “tyrant” had the gall to lecture the United States of America. Bill O’Reilly referred to Putin as “a criminal monster.” Charles Krauthammer kept it real and called Putin "a KGB thug.”

My favorite Putin slam was from New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Menendez put it this way: “When I read [the Putin op-ed] I felt like I wanted to vomit.”

That’s great. But the thought of Senator Menendez sometimes makes me want to vomit. I bet these days if the urge to vomit was given as a poll response to the mention of The United States Congress in general and Senator Menendez in particular, the urge to vomit would score very high.

I don’t mean to pick on Senator Menendez, but there is the scandal involving a too cozy relationship with a rich donor and allegations that while on a junket to the Dominican Republic the bachelor senator allegedly hired underage prostitutes. I certainly don’t care if Senator Menendez gets laid while junketing in the Caribbean. It’s his hypocrisy that makes me want to vomit. On the matter of prostitutes, Menendez took a righteous posture last year when secret servicemen on a presidential trip to Cartegena, Colombia were caught paying for sex. Menendez called loudly for the men to be fired, which they were.

When it comes to Syria and Russia and the use of chemical weapons against civilians, the matter of hypocrisy rises to a more profound level. The moral high ground all these Putin-bashers claim does not exist. Mention the words Vietnam, napalm, white phosphorus, agent orange, carpet bombing, shock & awe and depleted uranium and the moral outrage begins to evaporate into crocodile tears meant to stir up more bloody war.

The only hope for a good outcome in the Syrian imbroglio is if everyone concedes there’s plenty of historic evil to go around. One can certainly argue who’s more evil than the other, but that line of argument only ends like the scene in Dr. Strangelove on the redphone between the US president and the Soviet Premier about US bombers headed toward Russia.

“I'm sorry, too, Dmitri ... I'm very sorry ... All right, you're sorrier than I am, but I am as sorry as well ... I am as sorry as you are, Dmitri!  Don't say that you're more sorry than I am, because I'm capable of being just as sorry as you are.”

Calling people bad names should be relegated to the sandbox...

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new uncompromising three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1965