Whenever there is talk of war in the air, public opinion responds to the previous war, whatever it was.

So, until the attack on Pearl Harbor, many Americans opposed getting involved in what became World War II because they saw it as a replay of World War I. Which it really wasn’t, if you look at the details. Much of my parents’ generation, who fought World War II, supported military action in Vietnam because they saw a parallel between the Tonkin Gulf and Pearl Harbor. Seriously. And, anyway, Communists.

In the buildup to the Gulf War of 1990-91, plenty of us Boomers warned of another Vietnam. I don’t remember that I did, but I remember a few people tried to organize 1968-style street protests (not many showed up), and I remember listening to some self-styled military expert on NPR warn that Saddam’s elite troops would keep us bogged down for years, like the Vietcong. Well, whether you supported it or not, the Gulf War was possibly the least Vietnam-like foreign war the U.S. ever fought.

Before the invasion of Iraq, some of us did see something like another Vietnam, an un-winnable war that would sap us for years until we got smart enough to walk away from it. And in that case, we were right. But I think most of the public imagined the earlier Gulf War over again, and assumed it would be a relatively painless (for us) operation. The Bush Administration seems to have assumed the same thing.

Now the White House and some allies are considering some kind of limited strike on Syria because of chemical weapons use. “Regime change” has been ruled out, much to Grandpa John’s dismay. No one is talking about invasion or ground troops. Like many of us, I seriously doubt bombing Syria would accomplish anything, but my sense of things is that what’s being discussed doesn’t even rise to the level of what was done in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999. And it may be all the talk is just saber rattling. Sometimes saber rattling does the job, in fact, but it only works if everyone thinks you mean it.

But, predictably, already people are seeing a replay of the Bushies’ yellowcake scary cylinders mushroom cloud talk used to rush us into Iraq. They are certain the information about chemical attacks is just being made up to justify President Obama’s alleged commitment to “a state of ongoing war,” and we know Obama is lying because we remember Tonkin and babies pulled out of incubators and weapons of mass destruction.

But, y’know, governments don’t always lie. There really were atrocities in Kosovo. Hitler really was a nasty piece of work who would have attacked the U.S. eventually. Khrushchev really was sending nuclear missiles to Cuba. Sometimes awful stuff does happen that requires a response, even if it’s just threats.

Whether something has happened in Syria that requires a response I do not know. I think for President Obama, doing something is politically riskier than doing nothing, which is why I don’t think the chemical weapons stories can be dismissed out of hand. Getting our military bogged down in another prolonged action would get in the way of the President’s domestic policy goals, I would think. But I assume nothing. I just wish everyone else would assume nothing, too.

BTW, of all people, George Will is outraged that the President is “talking the nation into war.”

Barack Obama’s foreign policy dream — cordial relations with a Middle East tranquilized by “smart diplomacy” — is in a death grapple with reality. His rhetorical writhings illustrate the perils of loquacity. He has a glutton’s, rather than a gourmet’s, appetite for his own rhetorical cuisine, and he has talked America to the precipice of a fourth military intervention in the crescent that extends from Libya to Afghanistan.

I’d say Will’s rhetorical writhings are in a death grapple with a thesaurus. And the thesaurus is winning.

This is just bizarre. For some unfathomable reason, James O’Keefe attempted to harass the U.S. Attorney whose office brought phone tampering charges against him awhile back. And the ex-attorney wasn’t having it, and he told O’Keefe off in robust terms. And O’Keefe released a video of this. As Betty Cracker says,

ormer Breitbart rent-boy James O’Keefe must think the word “veritas” means “punch myself in the face:” … I’m no expert at “gotcha” video production and editing, but it seems like a bad idea to lead with three-plus minutes of the target establishing utter and complete pwnage. What’s he going to do for an encore, pour kerosene on his crotch and light a match?

There’s a lot of talk about intervening in Syria. I have no idea what’s going to happen in Syria, or even what ought to happen in Syria, but my sense of the situation is that there’s no “good” side. And we know that whatever President Obama does or does not do will be loudly denounced as being the wrong thing.

Among those solemnly telling us that we have a duty to intervene in Syria is Jeffrey Goldberg, for pity’s sake. In a sane world, Goldberg would be forever enjoined from writing about war, or foreign policy, or anything more serious than restaurant reviews.

Speaking of Iraq, don’t miss CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran, which really shouldn’t be news to any of you regulars.

I normally agree with Brian Beutler, but I think he fell short with The right’s black crime obsession. Which is not to say that the Right doesn’t have a black crime obsession; it certainly does. And I agree with some of Beutler’s points. But overall I’d say he falls short.

For example, in his analysis of why the killing of Chris Lane is not parallel to Trayvon Martin’s death, he leaves out the primary reason Trayvon Martin’s death became a national issue. Josh Martin explains,

For the last week or so, the right-wing racial resentment-o-sphere has been aghast about the horrific murder of Chris Lane, 22, a young Australian in the United States on a baseball scholarship. Lane was jogging when three young kids (two black, one either mixed race or white) decided to follow and kill him. The really sociopathic nature of the crime was brought home by the fact that one of the accused assailants allegedly told the police, “We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.”

In other words, it’s the Trayvon Martin case in reverse but now the liberal media is mum and President Obama isn’t rallying his gangbanger peeps to get all up in arms about it. Except of course when you consider that unlike the Martin case — where the press buzz and scandal was basically exclusively tied to the fact that George Zimmerman wasn’t arrested let alone charged with anything — two of the three boys allegedly behind Lane’s killing were arrested and immediately charged with capital murder. So young thugs kill an innocent man in cold blood and then get to walk free to death row or life imprisonment in the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.

Yeah, except that.

One more time — more than a month had passed after Trayvon Martin was killed, a month in which local police made it clear they were not going to investigate or charge Zimmerman with anything, before national media began to report on it. And what was reported was not that a white man (sort of) killed a black teenager, but that a white man had killed a black teenager and then walked out of the police station with a smile and a handshake, case closed. Had Zimmerman been charged with something within a reasonable amount of time, or if Trayvon Martin’s parents had received a reasonable explanation as to why no charges were being made, we never would have heard of Martin or Zimmerman.

Steve M has another quibble with what Beutler wrote.

Beutler is overlooking the fact that the angry right approves of the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The angry right doesn’t wish Martin were alive today. We know angry right-wingers don’t think it was an outrage, but they don’t think it was a horrible misunderstanding that led to tragedy, either. They interpret everything piece of evidence about Martin in the worst possible light, to portray him as a thug-in-development. They absolutely believe he was on the verge of killing George Zimmerman before Zimmerman killed him.

The allegedly angry left, on the other hand, does not approve of the shooting of Chris Lane. That he is dead is an outrage. I don’t know of anyone who says otherwise.

Steve M also nails it when he says RIGHT-WINGERS ARE WORKING REALLY HARD TO START A RACE WAR AND BLAME IT ON OBAMA. Apparently Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media machine has been pushing the belief that there is some kind of rising epidemic of black-on-white violent crime, and they are stoking fear and resentment of the black guy in the Oval Office as hard and as fast as they can stoke. They’ve even got the post-dementia Pat Robertson saying that President Obama is inciting black-on-white violence.

Of course, there is no rising tide of black-on-white violence. Rates of violent crime are going down, Josh Marshall also says,

Young black men commit murders in this country at a vastly disproportionate rate to young white men. But murder victims of both races are overwhelming killed by members of their own race. 86% of white murder victims were killed by other whites and 94% of blacks were killed by blacks. Those numbers are from 1976 to 2005, a period that includes the highest murder rate era of the late 20th century. The differential today is likely lower today since as murder rates have declined to historic levels over the last 20 years, the fall has been particularly sharp among black men – a small data point that among other things lends some additional credence to the theory that lead poisoning was a significant driver of crime rates in the late 20th century.

I’ve found that the hard racists can’t get past that first sentence in the paragraph above. You can tell them that, statistically, whites are far more likely to be murdered or raped by other whites. You can show them the data. It bounces right off them. I can’t tell if they think it’s a lie or if their brains just can’t process it at all.

I grew up with legal segregation, and I used to think I knew white racism pretty well. But now they are just unfathomable to me. I have no sense of why they think it was so outrageous for the President to say that if he had a son, he might have looked like Trayvon Martin, for example.

The thing is — most whites in the U.S. can be insensitive and oblivious about race, at least part of the time. But this element obsessed with black thugs in hoodies is way outside the current white racial oblivion norm. They’re more like relics of a bygone age; segregationist bitter enders. I believe most whites, on some level, recognize their knee-jerk hatred is irrational. And while there still are a lot of them left, I’d like to believe they’re now enjoying a last hurrah before white supremacy begins its slow fade into socio-cultural history.

The new bright, shiny thing in Republican land is the notion that they really really might could get the Obamacare individual mandate delayed for a year or two. Kimberly Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal,

The question of how the GOP should handle ObamaCare has of late been dominated by those who want the party to strip funding from the law, then shut down the government unless President Obama agrees. The Defund Republicans aren’t a large faction of the conservative movement, and their plan is deeply flawed. Their strength has been in exploiting the notable lack of alternate strategies for undercutting the unpopular health law.

That’s changing. A swelling coalition of conservative activists—card-carrying members of the “repeal ObamaCare” campaign—are lighting up the movement with a different approach. The plan aims to leverage public support, play on Democrat weaknesses, and, most notably, sidestep a shutdown fight that would damage the GOP even as it failed to kill the law. Meet the “Delay coalition.”

The thinking is that a shutdown will likely bite them in the ass, whereas a delay would enjoy public support and give them more time to sabotage the law and make sure it never works.

The Delay strategy is at least aimed at an achievable goal. Its outlines are contained in a letter engineered by Heather Higgins, CEO of Independent Women’s Voice. The letter was crafted with the aid of influential repeal activists—Phil Kerpen at American Commitment, Grover Norquist and Ryan Ellis at Americans for Tax Reform, the Galen Institute’s Grace-Marie Turner, Jim Capretta, Ken Hoagland, Avik Roy, the list rolls on—and now has more than 40 signatures. The letter calls on congressional Republican leaders to use one of this fall’s legislative fights to impose a one-year delay of ObamaCare’s individual mandate, exchange subsidies and taxes.

Here’s where Ms. Stossel goes from wistful to delusional:

The political calculus is that delay, unlike defund, pushes Democrats to do something that many are already inclined to do. The president himself has endorsed delay for key parts of the bill—the employer mandate, out-of-pocket-caps, income verification requirements. Unions, the bedrock of the liberal base, are demanding wholesale changes in the law. Vulnerable Senate Democrats know the ObamaCare exchanges are a pending disaster, and they are terrified of political fallout. Twenty-two House Democrats in July voted with Republicans to delay the individual mandate.

The President is delaying some aspects of the law for one year, mostly because business leaders and others told the White House they weren’t ready to implement them. But the stuff being delayed won’t impact the rest of the law, and will inconvenience a relatively small number of people. The parts Stossel and others want delayed would render the law completely inoperable.

There is no way the Senate or the President would go along with this. If Stossel and the rest of them believe otherwise, they really have lost touch with reality. However, it’s possible that they realize this won’t work, but they’re holding out the possibility that it can in order to keep the baggers in the House from shutting down the government.

A few days ago I saw this story about a Texas town that lost its water supply to fracking. Thirty more towns could lose water by the end of this year. I wrote a post about this on the other blog.

Texas is water-challenged without fracking. Aquifer levels have been dropping for many years, and recently Texas has seen one drought after another. But there’s something deeply and particularly depraved about using up water to get at fossil fuels, the use of which is possibly contributing to the droughts.

The Houston Chronicle reports,

Texas shale producers used about 25 billion gallons of water last year, and with more and more drilling in the Eagle Ford Formation, that figure will continue to grow. In some West Texas and South Texas counties – almost invariably drought-stricken counties – fracking accounts for 10 to 25 percent of water use and is projected to pass 50 percent in the future. Every month, oil and gas companies dispose of 290 million barrels of wastewater from fracking. That’s the equivalent of 18,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools, Luke Metzger of Environment Texas points out. That’s water that can never be used again – in a drought-debilitated state, no less.

At least partial solutions are possible, including mandatory recycling, saline or brackish water use and waterless fracking, but Texas lawmakers, for the most part, have allowed the industry to have its way. Although they approved funding for a Texas water plan, setting up a statewide vote this year, bills during the past session that would have required oil and gas companies to recycle water used in fracking never made it out of committee because of industry opposition.

The Legislature did pass a bill that encourages recycling, but it’s weak. As Metzger points out, “It’s still cheaper to just dispose of frackwater waste in injection wells, so most companies don’t have an incentive to recycle.”

Yeah, good ol’ business-friendly Texas. The climate-change-denying governor goes around telling businesses to come to Texas where they don’t have to deal with all those pesky regulations. So business interests in Texas have a free hand to use the small towns “as vassal states to be used up and discarded.”

Ironically, older ways of making a living are being hurt by the water shortage as well. Cattle need water, too; ranchers are having to sell off their livestock or else watch the animals die.

So “business-friendly” Texas isn’t necessarily friendly to all business; just those with enough money to spread around in Austin.

The musical selection for today’s blog: