Perhaps It Depends on What the Meaning of "Is" Is

Funny that we have a crisis with a Baathist government that leads a minority government oppressing a religious majority (and Kurds) that has chemical weapons and is killing its own people. While Syria has too little oil to matter, if they did have oil we got past that "no blood for oil" slogan over Libya this year. Is this a crisis we will get involved in?

Boy Assad seems perplexed that people think his government is doing bad things to people who don't like his authoritarian rule. This is clear in an ABC interview with Assad:

In his interview with Walters, his first sit down with an American journalist since the protests began, Assad denied he ordered a crackdown and blamed the violence on criminals, religious extremists and terrorists sympathetic to al Qaeda he claims are mixed in with peaceful demonstrators.

He said the victims of the street violence were not civilians protesters battling decades of one-party rule, he insisted.

"Most of the people that have been killed are supporters of the government, not the vice versa," he said. The dead have included 1,100 soldiers and police, he said.

Assad conceded only that some members of his armed forces went too far, but claims they were punished for their actions.

You can almost hear him wag his finger at Ms. Walters, saying, "I did not have oppressive relations with that people, the Syrians. I never told anybody to shoot, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the Syrian people. Thank you."

So is he killing Syrians? Or isn't he? Unless the news channels are just desperately trying to fill their 24/7 news stations with something (tip to Mad Minerva), this is confusing.

Since there are lots of red stains on Syrian streets, because close to 4-1/2 over four thousand Syrians have died since March when the protests began, the odds of nothing happening seem pretty low. Unless they walked into a door. Or fell down a flight of stairs. I smell a snow job.

Indeed, problems are escalating:

Syria says it has blocked 35 "armed terrorists" from entering the country after a clash along the border with Turkey.

Probably stalkers, or something. Drag a 100 Syrian pound note through a Palestinian refugee camp and you never know what you'll get.

The article also states that 50 more people in Homs slipped in their bathtubs and tragically died. Well, I'm sure that's how Boy Assad would explain the death toll.

And, as I have been, the US government is concerned about Syria's chemical arsenal:

The United States is quietly but closely monitoring the status of Syria’s large chemical-weapons stockpile amid fears that the regime of autocratic ruler Bashar al-Assad could use the warfare agents to quell continued political protests or divert the materials to extremist groups that operate in the region.

Or use them on Israel or Turkey.

You can believe Assad knows nothing about this whole killing and torturing stuff. But we're getting into baking cookies and standing by your diplomatic outreach territory here. I don't think Secretary of State Clinton is willing to go that far. Do you?

It's so confusing. Assad denies anything is happening. But bad things keep happening. And there are those rumors of red stains on the pavement. Oh wait, Assad did provide an explanation for the apparent contradictions in that interview:

"We don't kill our people… no government in the world kills its people, unless it's led by a crazy person," Assad said.

Well, there you go.

If Assad says nothing is happening, you can assume he is solidly behind not doing anything different than he has been doing. This is the biggest snow job we've seen in quite a while.