No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

President Vladimir Putin did President Obama an incredibly important favor (as well as Syria, the Middle East, and probably the world) and for that he is being criticized, maligned, ridiculed, and insulted, even by people who should know better. People seem to hate him just because he is the leader of Russia, in the same way people hate Obama for no reason other than he is Black. As a member of the KGB, and as the leader of a huge and complicated country, Putin has no doubt done many things we might not approve of, just as I do not approve of what Bush/Cheney did and now Obama is doing. While I of course know very little of what all of these men have done I doubt that any of them are without plenty of blood on their hands.

Whatever you might think of Putin, there is little doubt that he gave Obama a chance to escape from another unnecessary, illegal, and possibly truly devastating war that he was about to blunder into with an absolutely hypocritical rationale.  Abbas might have used chemical weapons against his own people. I’m not sure what the phrase “his own people” adds to the situation as so many innocent people are dead from these senseless wars, and the U.S. has dumped tons of chemicals on innocent people for years, Agent Orange, white phosphorous, depleted uranium, at least.

Of course I do not know the real reason for wanting to attack Syria. It probably has to do with wanting to further contain and harm Iran, it might have to do with some pipeline Syria is involved with, it almost certainly has something to do with protecting the poor, helpless, Israelis (with their own oversupply of chemical and nuclear weapons).

In any case it seems most everyone is jumping on the hate and malign Putting bandwagon. I think this must be partly due to the fact that he spoke some truth to power and had the temerity to suggest that it was dangerous for any country to claim exceptionalism. I guess we just can’t tolerate the idea that Russia, as well as many other nations, do not perceive America as we do, hardly a surprise, but shocking? I wouldn’t think so.

Obama had put his foot in his mouth with his blather about Syria crossing a “red line” and was about to go to war to preserve his credibility, as if the U.S. has any credibility these days, either at home or world-wide. Having run roughshod over the world in recent years, changing regimes, “shock and awe,” torturing and bombing, perhaps things might now begin to change. If so, Putin will have played an important role in bringing our claimed exceptionalism to a just and well deserved end. As exceptionalism is mainly an ethnocentric fantasy to begin with its demise should not surprise. As I suggested previously, the only thing we are truly exceptional at is stupidly wasting our money on permanent wars, critical to sustaining our truly disgusting and basically evil military/industrial/political complex that not only rains bombs and chemicals on the innocent, but also takes food from the mouths of children, health from our citizens, and money from our pockets, in order to give it to corporations and the obscenely wealthy. That is exceptionalism writ large!

 “[American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.” 
― Zbigniew Brzezinski