A few things...

Kimberly Dozier. Remember that name: When honest historians, looking back on our era, list the pseudo-journalists who worked overtime to whip up a new Cold War, Dozier's name will appear on the scroll of shame, and not toward the bottom. Case in point, from the Daily Beast:

When Assad’s troops used the nerve agent sarin against his own people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013, the Obama administration threatened a punitive bombing run against Assad’s military—not enough to disarm it, but enough to make a point.

Only then did Russia strong-arm its client state into giving up its WMD crown jewels—likely with the promise to defend Assad in return, which Russia has since done by deploying Russian troops on Syrian soil and unleashing a relentless series of airstrikes on Assad’s opponents, including Syrian rebels backed by the U.S.

Notice how she never names these "Syrian rebels backed by the U.S." That's because the group in question is undoubtedly Nusra (a.k.a. Al Qaeda) or Ahrar al-Sham (a.k.a. Al Qaeda) or the so-called "Free Syrian Army" (a.k.a. An Exercise in Fiction).

By this point, I probably don't need to refute Dozier's specifics, since many previous Cannonfire posts have gone over this territory. The thrust of Dozier's argument is that Russia worked with the U.S. on that occasion only after we threatened to go into Syria militarily. Thus, Dozier implies, Obama should level a similar threat now; doing so can only have the happy result of bringing Russia and the US closer together.

Actually, American bellicosity toward Syria is more likely to result in World War III. Dozier is right, in a sense: Mutual nuclear destruction is an excellent way to attain international intimacy. As Tom Lehrer once sang: "We will all fry together when we fry..."

Who made these weapons? Skeptics will scoff: "Consider the source." A fair sentiment, perhaps. Still, I wonder if the following claim is true? (Note: Sweida, also called As-Suwayda, is a city in southern Syria, near Jordan.)

The concerned authorities in Sweida, in cooperation with the locals, seized on Sunday a vehicle loaded with large amounts of arms and ammunition in the western countryside of the southern province.

A source at Sweida Governorate told SANA that the vehicle was heading to the terrorist organizations operating in the eastern countryside of the neighboring Daraa province.

The arms and ammunition which were confiscated included 7 Israeli-made anti-tank rocket launchers, 62 shells, 128 RPG shells of different kinds, 43 120 mm mortar rounds, 42 82 mm mortar rounds and 100 23 mm machinegun bullets.

Earlier on Saturday, the authorities, in cooperation with the popular committees, seized hundreds of U.S. and Israeli-made anti-tank mines loaded in a pickup in the western countryside of Sweida. The weapons were bound for the terrorists in eastern al-Badiya (desert).

If you know your anti-tank mines, you may want to check out the videos which accompany this story. Are those actual Israeli munitions?

It's 2008 all over again. You can tell by the stench of horseshit in the air. Salon has become a stable so reeky that even Hercules couldn't clean it:

The precious and all-knowing polls already show Bernie Sanders defeating Republicans in a general election and Robert Reich has already explained why Sanders can easily win the presidency. In a Huffington Post piece titled “6 Responses to Bernie Skeptic,” Reich debunks the trusted myth of Clinton supporters and Republicans:

“He’d never beat Trump or Cruz in a general election.”

Wrong. According to the latest polls, Bernie is the strongest Democratic candidate in the general election, defeating both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in hypothetical matchups. (The latest RealClear Politics averages of all polls shows Bernie beating Trump by a larger margin than Hillary beats Trump, and Bernie beating Cruz while Hillary loses to Cruz.)

“America would never elect a socialist.”

P-l-e-a-s-e. America’s most successful and beloved government programs are social insurance – Social Security and Medicare. A highway is a shared social expenditure, as is the military and public parks and schools. The problem is we now have excessive socialism for the rich (bailouts of Wall Street, subsidies for Big Ag and Big Pharma, monopolization by cable companies and giant health insurers, giant tax-deductible CEO pay packages) – all of which Bernie wants to end or prevent.

We've dealt with Reich's delusions before: This fine man is kidding himself.

Neither Social Security nor Medicare would have stood a chance if the politicians pushing those measures used the S-word. FDR never called himself a socialist; if he had, he would never have been elected and we would have had no New Deal. (At the time, actual socialists despised FDR.)

Yes, Sanders does well in matchups against Trump and Cruz -- now. Why? Because Sanders has not received any negative press, while Hillary has undergone an unimaginable barrage of lies and deceptions.

(Bernie Sanders is also a firm opponent of the death penalty. Me too. But I also understand that roughly 60 percent of Americans support the death penalty. The Bernie Brigade is filled with deluded dolts who think that their positions are more popular than is actually the case.) 

The Republicans have made it very clear that they want Bernie to win. Thus -- for the moment -- their considerable media assets have taken no measures against the man. Their strategy was laid out openly in this National Review story from June of last year...

Support Bernie Sanders! This is a call to action for every Republican anxious to win back the White House in 2016.

After a GOP power player sent me a piece from left-leaning Salon headlined “Hillary Clinton is going to lose: She doesn’t even see the frustrated progressive wave that will nominate Bernie Sanders,” my heart went pitter-patter, beginning to sense an opportunity. But it was not until I saw a headline in The Hill warning that the “Sanders surge is becoming a bigger problem for Clinton,” accompanied by “It may be time for Hillary Clinton to take the challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders more seriously,” that I was truly motivated to join Team Bernie and rally my fellow Republicans to do the same.

Last month, the Christian Science Monitor observed:

And some Republicans are already salivating at the prospect of a Sanders nomination.

“We're going to win every state,” Ohio Gov. John Kasich said in last week's Republican debate, “if Bernie Sanders is the nominee.”

"Wild, socialistic, liberal Bernie Sanders" would be "easy to beat," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said recently on the "John Gibson Show."

Priebus must have realized that he had de-bagged the cat -- oopsie! -- because he also said (on another recent occasion) that Sanders would be the tougher opponent. Of course, that disingenuous statement was simply his version of "Whatever you do, don't throw me into that brier patch!"

Bloomberg Politics’ Sahil Kapur reported that Republican operatives have “a strange crush on Bernie Sanders,” and it goes beyond the RNC’s pro-Sanders rapid-response during Sunday night’s debates.

After the debate, the Republican political action committee America Rising promoted the narrative that Sanders won the debate... Meanwhile, American Crossroads, a group co-founded by Karl Rove, is airing an ad in Iowa bolstering a core tenet of Sanders’ case against Clinton: that she has received large sums of campaign contributions from Wall Street, and therefore can’t be trusted to crack down on big banks.

“Hillary rewarded Wall Street with a $700 billion bailout, then Wall Street made her a multi-millionaire,” a narrator in the ad says. “Does Iowa really want Wall Street in the White House?”

Yep, Karl Rove’s operation is not only complaining about the bailout his former boss signed into law, Team Rove is also suddenly worried about Wall Street’s influence in DC – just like Bernie Sanders.

Or put another way, Reince Priebus can say he sees Sanders as a stronger general-election candidate, but his actions suggest he means the opposite.

Seriously. The TARP bailout -- negotiated by George Bush's White House -- is now supposedly all Hillary's fault. Or so we have been assured by Karl Rove, America's most trusted political commentator.

History lesson: The vast majority of Democratic senators supported TARP, including Barack Obama, Jim Webb, Barbara Boxer, and Joe Biden. There were only a few exceptions. (Yes, Bernie was one of them; so was good old Russ Feingold, a man who should be running for president right now. Unlike Bernie, Russ could defeat Trump -- handily.)

But now we are supposed to think that TARP was all Hillary's fault. Rove said it, progs believe it, and that settles it.

Those of you who dare to doubt the Karl Rove version of history may recall that, at the time, TARP was presented as an emergency measure -- the sole alternative to an economic Ragnarok which was widely believed to be mere days away. In fact, it really was the sole alternative, at least in the sense that no other plans were on the table. Something had to be done. It was beyond the power of any Democrat to negotiate with the Fed and the banks, or to force the Dubya administration to offer anything better.

This propaganda meme -- that Hillary was responsible for TARP -- exemplifies why I have reluctantly come to support her. When they hand you lined paper, write the other way. When the hand you incessant lies about a candidate, vote for that candidate.

Even when I was furious with Hillary, I felt a desire to vote for her every single time I heard some creep pretend that she was solely responsible for the Iraq war. ("Hillary forced Dubya to do it!") At the time, the vote authorizing military force had widespread, bipartisan support -- not just in Congress but from the public. (The media did not call it a "war vote," and I doubt that either the Senate or the public thought of it that way. The vote was sold as a measure to force Saddam Hussein to observe a UN resolution for disarmament.) It is perfectly fair to say that Hillary Clinton bowed to the will of the people in 2003. We now make Hillary the scapegoat for our own sins.

No other politician in history has had to deal with the amount of sheer fucking shit that has been tossed at the Clintons. You want an anti-Establishment candidate? Vote Clinton. They have always been loathed by the Establishment. No other politicians have been on the receiving end of so many deceptions, witch hunts and smears.

You want to know why Sanders is getting the youth vote? Because young people have no direct memory of the Bill Clinton presidency. A nonsensical revisionist history has been drilled into their heads.

Most of them do not know that Bill Clinton was a Democratic president during an essentially conservative era. Throughout the 1990s, much of the electorate leaned toward Limbaugh-ism: The GOP had not yet become a clown car, and the internet (for the most part) did not exist as a means to counterbalance the Republican hammerlock on the national conversation. The media -- right, left and in-between -- launched a ceaseless barrage of anti-Clinton propaganda. (If you want the details, look for Conason and Lyons' superb book The Hunting of the President.)

Nevertheless, against massive odds, the Clinton years were an era of peace and prosperity. Moreover, Clinton offered the most progressive politics that one could reasonably have expected from any President operating at that time and in that culture. The Bernie-ites now portray Bill Clinton as (literally) to the right of Dubya -- but throughout the 1990s, much of the country believed Bill Clinton to be a socialist wildman who wanted to coddle criminals and round up the guns. Many college-aged voters of that period bought into that propaganda.

Today's young voters are even more nescient than were their counterparts of twenty years ago.

Let's face it: Young people are ill-informed dolts who smugly consider themselves wiser than their elders, even though they lap up disinformation the way my pooch snarfs up Snausages. Take a poll of the people in your neighborhood under the age of 25. Ask them two questions: "Did Reagan increase or decrease the budget deficit? Did Clinton increase or decrease the deficit?" You know full well how our gullible, easily bamboozled, historically illiterate younglings would answer.

(For the younglings in the audience, I shall provide the answers. Reagan ran up a national debt larger than that of all previous presidents combined. Clinton, by contrast, was the only modern president to run a surplus. He got the government out of the red while overseeing the country's longest postwar economic boom, even though the economy seemed to be a hopeless mess when he took the oath of office. Dubya put us in the Deep Red again.)

So please don't expect me to be impressed by the spate of "Young people love Bernie" stories that have been planted throughout the left side of the internet. Youngsters don't know nuthin'.