Clear skies and twinkling stars greeted me earlier this Wednesday morning, but it now appears fog is rolling across the north coast of California, but most-likely by mid-day it will be sweltering with hot-boxed temperatures in the low 70s again — the mid 80s predicted for this weekend.
A near-enough tropical heat wave!
Up here amongst us chilly-prone peoples, it sure does feel like it.

Heat is also building on the other side of the nation as Congresscritters in DC try to get their shit together for a humane slaughter of Syrians — although nearly six-in-10 Americans still reject a military strike against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

(Illustration found here).

Yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee to rally the troops, and as he claims, to “…explain to the American people why we are here…”  and why the need to pitch a military strike against the Assad regime for using chemical weapons against his own people.
Mostly, though, Kerry tried to make sure this was not another military fuck up:

“I remember Iraq,” Kerry said at the beginning of his remarks, sitting beside Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a fellow Vietnam veteran who served with Kerry in the Senate during the Iraq War.
“Secretary Hagel and I and many of you sitting on the dais remember Iraq in a special way because we were here for that vote.
We voted.
And so we are especially sensitive, Chuck and I, to never again asking any member of Congress to take a vote on faulty intelligence.”

WTF? “Faulty intelligence?” How about lying? John, are you lying now? Really, who’s to know? And one must remember Kerry voted ‘yes’ for the Iraq war, then while running for prez in 2004, back-pedeled a bit, claiming that even though he still wouldn’t change his ‘yes’ vote, he’d have done things “very differently” than George Jr.
Kerry is an arrogant, elite asshole — I wouldn’t trust him as far as you could throw an asshole.

And the long-faced shithead also tried to cover President Obama’s political back with a “no” vote on the president’s “red line” analogy last year — lines are not always lines:

“Now, some have tried to suggest that the debate we’re having today is about President Obama’s red line,” Kerry said at one point.
“I could not more forcefully state that is just plain and simply wrong.
This debate is about the world’s red line.
It’s about humanity’s red line.
And it’s a red line that anyone with a conscience ought to draw.”

Red line that bullshit.

Kerry did slip one slope quickly yesterday in his time before that august group, but again back-pedaled hard:

However Mr Kerry raised eyebrows by requesting that the use of troops not be explicitly ruled out in the proposal in case “Syria implodes” or other catastrophic developments unfold.
“I don’t want to take off the table an option that might or might not be on the table,” he said.
Pressed on his remarks, Mr Kerry said he had merely been “thinking out loud” about hypothetical developments but would “shut that door now as tight as we can”.
“Let me be very clear,” Mr Kerry said.
“There will not be American boots on the ground with respect to the civil war.”

There is problems with the US claims of how all this shit came about, but it’s got gaps.
On Monday, McClatchy punched some holes in the US picture, especially on that astonishing intel on knowing Assad’s guys were about to use CW in battle.
And were mum about it:

Another eyebrow-raising administration claim was that U.S. intelligence had “collected streams of human, signals and geospatial intelligence” that showed the regime preparing for an attack three days before the event.
The U.S. assessment says regime personnel were in an area known to be used to “mix chemical weapons, including sarin,” and that regime forces prepared for the Aug. 21 attack by putting on gas masks.
That claim raises two questions: Why didn’t the U.S. warn rebels about the impending attack and save hundreds of lives?
And why did the administration keep mum about the suspicious activity when on at least one previous occasion U.S. officials have raised an international fuss when they observed similar actions?
On Dec. 3, 2012, after U.S. officials said they detected Syria mixing ingredients for chemical weapons, President Barack Obama repeated his warning to Assad that the use of such arms would be an unacceptable breach of the red line he’d imposed that summer.
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chimed in, and the United Nations withdrew all nonessential staff from Syria.
Last month’s suspicious activity, however, wasn’t raised publicly until after the deadly attack.
And Syrian opposition figures say the rebels weren’t warned in advance in order to protect civilians in the area.
“When I read the administration’s memo, it was very compelling, but they knew three days before the attack and never alerted anyone in the area,” said Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian opposition activist who runs the Washington-based Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
“Everyone was watching this evidence but didn’t take any action?”

Indeed. Read the whole McClatchy  piece — the problem is the problem.

Assad is a monster — seemingly there’s still of few of them out there in the world, despite this supposedly modern era of peace, goodwill and other high-sounding bullshit. He is the problem and one wonders why not a drone strike at the bastard, or a Seal Team Six operation to take out the asshole?
Syria is already well on its way to pure chaos, and when Assad goes (he will, just ask the late, infamous Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi), Syria will be worse than Iraq is right now, which is pretty shitty.
The kink is the US — normal asshole Rand Paul did come up with the ultimate question yesterday on this whole matter for Kerry, despite the whimsey:

Claiming he hasn’t had “one person come up to me and say they’re for this war,” Paul challenged Kerry to pledge that if Congress votes down the resolution, the president won’t “go ahead and do the bombing anyway.”
“…If we lose, what?” Paul asked.
“Make me proud today, Sec. Kerry.
Stand up for us and say that you’re going to obey the Constitution, and if we vote you down – which is unlikely, by the way – but if we do, that you would go with what the people say through their Congress, and you wouldn’t go forward with a war that Congress votes against.”
To Kerry’s response that Paul can “still be proud” because Mr. Obama maintains constitutional authority to act, the senator lamented: “You’re making a joke of us – you’re making us into theater.”

Of the absurd and the asshole — ax or axe, pick your pick.