Dennis Kucinich is certainly right on this one.

Suppose that instead of running around castigating Russia for blocking our efforts in the UN Security Council, we decided to sit down and have a talk with them. “Look, we know you have financial, economic, and strategic interests in Syria. We have competing financial, economic, and strategic interests in Syria. What if we tried to work out some compromise where we could both get a fair deal without resorting to an actual war or even a proxy war.”

That might be called diplomacy. Calling each other names, seeing how we can force the other side to agree to what we want, economic sanctions, threats, boycotts, financing one side of a civil war – these are not what I call diplomacy.

Pretending that our disagreement is about morality, democracy, or economic system only distracts us from getting to the heart of what is really bothering us.

The Real News Network has this interview with some of the usual suspects, Rania Masri and Chris Hedges On Obama’s Syria Address.

MASRI: Now, for myself as an Arab American from the region, as somebody who’s been working on peace and social justice issues both here in the United States and in Lebanon, I have to say that although President Obama’s final conclusion was not surprising, his prelude to it was deeply, deeply offensive, deeply offensive, unethical, and ahistoric for him to sit there and to go on at length about these images of the children that have been gassed and how images of children that have been gassed have moved him to action was just repulsive, because the level of hypocrisy in that statement cannot be tolerated–the fact that it is the United States government also under his leadership that have funded and supported the Israeli use of white phosphorus against Palestinians in Gaza, the fact that it is the U.S. government that has themselves directly used white phosphorus against the Iraqis in Falluja. And it is the toxic legacy of the use of white phosphorus in Iraq that is actually greater than the toxic legacy of both the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as report that was published several years ago proved.

I may not be as radical as Rania Masri, but I did find the speech a little offensive. It might have been better for Obama to have quietly accepted the praise for having backed away from the brink of involvement in this war. His speech destroyed some of the goodwill I felt for him.

He seems so damn sure of things that he ought not to be so sure of. He may feel it necessary to talk the BS about our exceptionalism to satisfy the right wing in this country, but it makes me scream every time he does it. Has he absolutely no sense of history? Or does he know the history, but can still says what he does?