Found on Facebook Last Night

      From Brent Terry: "If, as ABC News is reporting, the US warned Russia of the missile strike, and if, as it appears, Russia warned Syria, that leads to a very interesting possible conclusion. Consider the implications: Trump warns Putin, who warns Assad, which means the three of them were working in concert in what becomes not a military operation against a foreign enemy, but a staged event, a stunt, a piece of political theater. But to what end? The only thing I can think of is that it was an elaborate scheme to provide Trump with political cover at a time his entire presidency was imploding. Now we know enough about our narcissist in chief to see that on his end this is a perfectly reasonable assumption. But what does Putin have to gain? Well, he has invested years and who knows how much money in shepherding Trump into the White House, so he has plenty of reason to prop him up. And Assad? He will do what Russia tells him to do.
      This seems to be the direction the dominoes are falling, and the repercussions will be earth shattering. I mean a US president colludes with not one, but two foreign leaders who are antagonistic to our national interests at the very least, in order to stage a phony and staggeringly expensive "attack" for the sole reason of propping up a president in free fall. Let's look past the obvious betrayal of the American people and the latest seemingly treasonous actions of a mad president, and look at the deeper moral implications.
      Trump used the gas attacks perpetrated by Assad against his own people, and which caused the suffering and death of many children, as an excuse to launch the missles, but in actuality was working with the monster who gassed the children in the first place. He had no problem whatsoever using the suffering and death of children to manufacture political cover. And then he went on television and dared to present himself as the defender of "God's children." No American president that I can think of has put on such a depraved and inhuman performance. How much longer can we allow this monster to run this game, allow him to be the face of this country?
      Do I know this is what transpired? No. Does the evidence point in that direction? It sure seems to. This monster has to go. What say you?"

      This is pretty much how I see it. One would have to have about 100 pounds of brain damage (and most right wingers, especially Trump supporters, do) to believe that Trump would pick up where Obama left off and actually do what he did, which was fight a proxy war against his old buddy Putin to take down Assad's government.
     The mayor of Homs, Syria claimed that five men died in the bombing raid. If that's so, that means Trump spent millions on 50 missiles and killed five innocent human beings just to give himself some wag the dog action. And if this extra-Congressional missile strike proves anything, this just brings Trump's complicity with Putin into greater relief. By that I mean, as a partisan political stunt, it failed miserably because it further exposes that Trump's even deeper in Putin's hip pocket than we'd ever thought.
     And the consensus I'm hearing that Assad did indeed launch that chemical weapon strike is disturbing and not benefiting from serious analysis. Obama's administration had been saying for years that Assad's been using chemical weapons against his own people without providing a shred of evidence to support those allegations. And if Trump, Putin and Assad would work in concert to keep a blithering idiot like Trump in power, is it so much of a stretch to believe that either the Russian or US president wouldn't think twice about killing 31 children and more adults for a political stunt? Both Trump & Putin are fucking ogres and would think nothing about killing children to achieve a short term political end (especially after Trump's thoughtless misadventure in Yemen in January that killed almost a dozen other children, one of whom being an 8 year-old girl who was a US citizen.).
     And if Trump cared so much for "God's children" he wouldn't be cutting federal funds to sanctuary cities and he wouldn't be stopping Syrian refugees from coming into our country. He'd be showing compassion toward these people, not bombing their country into the Stone Age.