the red line

 My NPR station goes to BBC at eleven and that stays on until five in the morning so I fall asleep to it and I wake up to it in the morning.  The idea that the Putin is running out of steam is common consensus among the experts on CNN, but likely they will be doing a lot of damage to Ukraine before they are done.  A lot of damage to the Russian army too, but Putin does not care about that.  I saw on CNN that he is bringing a fleet down from Vladivostok around China and India and up through the Suez canal to get to Ukraine.  Also he may be bringing in Syrians

This whole thing sort of begins with Syria and the Arab Spring. Syria had a particularly odious dictator and they had him on the run, and everybody thought he would be gone, but then Hezbollah came to his aid.  Obama was big on rooting for the opposition (which at the beginning was mostly freedom-loving Syrians of the kind we like, but as the going got rough they faded and many were replaced by Jihadis).

Anyway there was talk about chemical weapons and Obama said that if Hassad, the Syrian dictator, used them that would be a red line for the US intervening, and then Hassad used chemical weapons, and we were in a pickle because did we really want to put troops in Syria?

No.  We kind of wriggled our way out of it, and the Russians moved in.  Well it didn't seem like such a bad thing to me at the time.  Let them get tangled up in that tar baby.  

But see the reason it would be such a tar baby for us is as the good guys we would have to worry about killing civilians and determining who was on our side, but the Russkies didn't care about that at all and just started bombing everybody.

There has been some talk about how we shouldn't be so shocked at the Russkies bombing civilians because look what they did in Syria, but not much about the Obama red line incident, and I am not sure why.

Actually there has been some talk about the Russians using chemical weapons, but I don't know, I think this whole thing about chemical weapons is overdone.  They are not that reliable, and may blow back on you, and you can kill more people with bombs anyway.

That went on longer than I thought it would.  The Sun-Times and the Trib are both fading.  The Trib is in the untender hands of one of those corporate raiders, and the Sun-Times is in the hands of do-gooder, non-profit types so we will see how that goes.  Both papers have way too much sports, Bears, Bears, Bears, but that is what makes them the most money.  International news has faded though local news appears to be holding steady.  I'm glad to hear that Beagles is a big fan of the comics because I am too. but I doubt that we both have the same tastes that way.  Both my papers sit on the table unread at this early morning hour, but as I read them today I will make some notes about which ones I like and hate and Beagles can do the same as he wolfs down his amazing harvest bowl and we can exchange our preferences, just to have something to talk about.