In happier times, before things got awkward.

I was curious about the extent to which we had gone prying into sensitive communications by Angela Merkel. Was it an encrypted phone that we may have (the White House isn’t saying whether we did or not) tapped?

This report indicates not:

Merkel told EU leaders in Brussels on Friday morning that she has two mobile phones. One, a Blackberry, is encrypted and the other, a Nokia, is not. They are used to separate conversations about the government, and those covering the activity of her party, the Christian Democrats (CDU).

She explained that she used a mobile phone funded by the CDU to make calls concerning the party to demonstrate that she would not use a state government-funded phone to make CDU-specific calls.

This is likely the phone that the NSA were listening in on. Any calls made as Chancellor are done on an encrypted Blackberry or encrypted landlines, the Welt newspaper reported on Friday….

I don’t know whether that’s accurate or not. But I liked the fact that somebody out there is at least asking the questions that Tom Clancy would have asked, were he still with us…

Maybe I should have known that. But then, I was out of the country in 1963.

I saw this in the lobby of the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center. It’s part of a display marking the 50th anniversary of that key year in the civil rights movement.

I’ve heard the “Thank God for Mississippi” line so many times, used to make us South Carolinians feel better about our economic situation, educational attainment, etc.

But I never realized it was used this way.

If you want to see the exhibit at the convention center, hurry. It just runs through the end of this month.

A lot of America is disgusted with the performance of the Republican Party in Washington over the last few weeks, no one more so than the conservatives at The Wall Street Journal. Daniel Henninger’s column this morning marveled at the party’s cluelessness:

What do children know that the Republicans in Congress don’t know? The kids know, because it is the mother’s milk of their battery-powered lives, that if you don’t recognize shifts in the mighty flows of information, you will be swept aside, abandoned. You will beBlackBerry….

Blackberry? Whoa, that is way harsh, dude. But read on:

Now suddenly comes a marketing ploy from the GOP’s backbenches: “DefundObamaCare.” This idea was supposed to rally the nation against the Affordable Care Act. So if you were to ask students in marketing at the local community college what they thought of “Defund ObamaCare,” what do you guess they might say? They’d say, absent the product, it sounds like a niche strategy with a low sales ceiling. Defund ObamaCare is now the Republicans’ New Coke.

Want a look at how a pro is spinning the Washington mess? Punch into Twitter.com and type “Barack Obama” into the search window. Click on “Barack Obama,” next to the “End This Now” logo. The Obama tweets the past week have been fairly amazing. As in the presidential campaign against Mitt Romney, the Twitter feeds going out in the name of the president of the United States are virtually wall-to-wall propaganda….

Republicans complain constantly that the media “lets him get away with it.” The media is floating down the electric river. No, they—the message-impoverished Republicans—let him get away with it. The Washington GOP is now a political Gulliver, tied down by tweets and twerps.

A month ago, before the congressional Republicans’ General Custer Caucus used “Defund ObamaCare” to vote themselves into their current, bullet-riddled fort, the Obama characterization of the entire GOP as “tea party Republicans” would have been a pathetic stretch. He was the one being laughed at by the whole world for his vanishing red lines in Syria and a foreign policy that even his own defense secretary described as “swinging from vine to vine.”…

And that’s what hurts most on the right. Obama was on the ropes just weeks ago. So the GOP, brainlessly and unnecessarily, hands him a month-long crisis in which he totally comes out on top. General Custer Caucus, indeed.

That’s how I’m comforting myself after seeing the above. News reports are identifying the guy with the flags as Michael Ashmore, of Hooks, Texas.

Needless to say, a lot of folks are indignant. From The New Republic:

The appearance of a Confederate Flag at a Tea Party rally at the White House drew appropriately sharp responses online today—not to mention a schizophrenic array of defenses: To some online rightists, the rebel flag was a liberal plant; to others, critics who said there was something troubling about Confederate imagery at a protest against a black president were the real racists, since the flag was about heritage and not racism.

In fact, a flag waved in tribute to the history of the Old South would be very appropriate at the molten core of today’s Tea Party right.

I subscribe neither to the Occupy Wall Street belief that big private money is running our federal government to the detriment of the rest of us, or the Tea Party belief that government is “too big.”

But… I’ll confess to an impression — and it’s nothing more than that — that when you total it all up, there’s too much money in D.C., period.

It’s just a feeling I used to get, visiting Washington. And I haven’t been there, for work purposes, since the ’90s. So this isn’t just about the buildup of the federal government during the Bush and Obama administrations.

I’d get this feeling standing on the Metro platform waiting for a subway train. People around me just looked way more prosperous, based on their attire, than the people one sees waiting for public transportation elsewhere. More prosperous than in New York, or London, in my limited experience (even around Wall Street; even within The City). And “limited experience” is key; this is as subjective and anecdotal as anything gets.

But I got to thinking about that impression reading this piece by Joel Kotkin at newgeography:

Besides shared concerns over Syria, the NSA and IRS, grass-roots conservatives and liberals increasingly reject the conventional wisdom of their Washington betters. What increasingly matters here is not political “spin,” but the breadth of anti-Washington sentiment. After all, while most of the country continues to suffer low economic growth, the Washington area has benefitted from the expansion of federal power. The entire industry of consultants, think tanks, lawyers and related fields, no matter their supposed ideologies, has waxed while the rest of America has waned.

This has been a golden era for the nation’s capital, perhaps the one place that never really felt the recession. Of the nation’s 10 richest counties, seven are in the Washington area. In 1969, notes liberal journalist Dylan Matthews, wages in the D.C. region were 12 percent higher than the national average; today, they are 36 percent higher. Matthews ascribes this differential not so much to government per se, but on the huge increase in lobbying, which has nearly doubled over the past decade.

Matthews draws a liberal conclusion, not much different than one a conservative would make, that “Washington’s economic gain may be coming at the rest of the country’s expense.” Washington may see itself as the new role model for dense American cities but this reflects the fact that it’s one of the few places where educated young people the past five years have been able to get a job that pays well.

This is intolerable to Americans of differing political persuasions. …

No, I’m not on the verge of becoming populist or anything; I assure you. I’m just saying that I know the feeling.

To take it a bit further…

It’s not just a money thing. The fact that such an enormous proportion of the news and commentary that people in this country comes out of Washington, combined with the way that Beltway-style politics has overwhelmed state and local, turning Tip O’Neill’s dictum on its head (now, all politics is national, not local), is even more troubling. (Actually, those two things are sort of the same phenomenon.)

Increasingly, with the decline of mid-sized dailies like The State to go out and collect local and state news, Americans know less and less about what’s happening in their own communities.

And that is a bad thing. I say that not just as a guy who has known for the last few years that about the only jobs left in my trade are in Washington, while my life is here. It’s just really, objectively, a bad thing.

I’ve complained before that my one regular source of information and perspective on Latin America (now that no one pays for me to have a subscription to The Economist) is Mary Anastasia O’Grady in The Wall Street Journal.

I mean, I’m glad that at least she is writing something about the rest of the hemisphere. I could just do without some of her slant on things.

She really went overboard today, comparing the situation in Argentina with that here at home:

Last week Mrs. Kirchner had brain surgery, described by her doctors as low risk, to remove a blood clot. She is recovering. But the republic is near death. Its survival depends on whether the Supreme Court president, Ricardo Lorenzetti, is able to withstand government pressure to knuckle under.

The U.S. Supreme Court knows something of that. In his 2010 state of the union,Barack Obama scolded the justices who voted for the majority in Citizens United, and progressives badgered them relentlessly. Two years later Chief Justice John Roberts ruled in favor of ObamaCare…

Yeahhhh… Riiighht… (imagine that in the voice of Doctor Evil). John Roberts, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, declared Obamacare constitutional just because he was scared after the president was less than pleased with a previous ruling.

Give me a break…

In the future, every newspaper will be world-famous for 15 minutes.

Some possible topics for this morning:

Girl who was shot in Five Points may be paralyzed — Bond denied for alleged gunman. The city has some difficult conversations ahead of it on how to prevent such horrific events.

Actually, after that, everything else seems less significant…

International Herald Tribune to become International NYT — It happens on Tuesday. The ironic thing about it is, the link has all these pictures of historical figures reading the paper, which attests to the legendary nature of the brand… but they’re dropping it.

Man arrested at Buckingham Palace — He tried to enter the palace with a knife. Meanwhile, in other evidence that the empire has fallen apart, Prince George’s godparents to be commoners…

Op-ed by Larry Summers: In shutdown debates, focus should be on growth instead of deficit, he says. This line grabbed me: “…future historians may well see today’s crisis as the turning point at which American democracy was shown to be dysfunctional — an example to be avoided rather than emulated.

Anyone else listening to this? It’s on live as I type.

I missed the opening remarks, but what I’ve heard so far, with relation to the 14th Amendment, isn’t entirely persuasive.

It seems the president just doesn’t want to let the Republicans off the hook (to the extent that they are ON the hook, which is debatable since the Tea Partiers don’t care). In other words, he doesn’t want the power to fix it himself.

But on the other hand, do WE want the president to have that power — something that is debatable until he tries to assert it, and we see whether it holds up before the Supremes, and in world markets?

The power to appropriate funds belongs to the Congress. Is it really a good idea to cut them out of the loop, just because so many of the present members are grossly irresponsible?

Must give us pause. Especially the limited and Constitutional government types among us…

Gordon Cooper: “You boys know what makes this bird go up? FUNDING makes this bird go up.”
Gus Grissom: “He’s right. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”

Eva Moore called to interview me about Steve Benjamin the other day, which was a bit awkward for me, because as I told her, she’s followed his mayoralty a lot more closely than I have, so what could I tell her?

But we chatted anyway, and she used some of it.

I learned this from Leon Lott this morning when we were wishing each other happy birthday via phone. He said he was reading the Free Times last night, and saw my name “about 100 times” in Eva’s story.

Well, slight exaggeration. It was in there — let’s see — four times. Here are the passages in question, from Eva’s “The Benjamin Doctrine“:

For many years, Columbia was perceived as a city in which neighborhoods, not businesses, held the power. Neighborhood association presidents have the ear of their council members, who make sure various projects or developments do and don’t happen. But lately, that’s been changing.

Brad Warthen, former editorial page editor of The State, describes the shift:

“What you tended to see under Coble and that City Council was things could not happen ‘because,’” Warthen says. “There was always some factor considered an enemy of this neighborhood; some neighborhood would be against it — just a sense that there were issues you couldn’t move forward on.” …

Despite the contentious mood on Council, and the city’s shifting power structures, Benjamin is not necessarily a polarizing figure. Unlike many public officials, he can’t be described as “a study in contrasts,” or “a larger-than-life character” or similar clichés. He’s more of a blank slate.

“There’s an ecumenical appeal to him — I think people can project whatever they want onto Steve,” says Warthen, who’s seen politicians in Columbia come and go. “He kind of tries to be all things to all people.”

Benjamin is the first black mayor of Columbia. He’s a Democrat, but his campaigns have been run by Richard Quinn & Associates, a storied Republican firm. He has close ties to the business community. As a former lobbyist, he’s well known at the State House. And his wife, a circuit court judge, joins him to the legal community. In the densely knit world of Columbia, he’s crossed by a lot of threads.

“A piece of it is he’s not from around here,” Warthen adds. “He has an accent that is plain American. Not regional. That’s a small piece of why I think people can look at him and think, ‘He’s like me.’”

Benjamin’s parents were from South Carolina, but he was born and raised in New York City. He moved to Columbia to attend the University of South Carolina — first the political science program, and later the law school….

I’m not sure I was being completely clear with that last bit. Let me elaborate…

Steve doesn’t sound black or white, or like he’s from any particular place. He sounds, essentially, the way I did as a young man, although the last 26 years back in South Carolina have caused me to sound vaguely Southern (I think). We both had SC roots, but grew up elsewhere.

So it may sound odd when I say that folks in Columbia can listen to him and think, “He’s like me” — particularly if they’ve lived here their whole lives and sound like it.

I just mean he sounds like, as Eva put it, a sort of blank slate. Since his accent, and the rest of him, don’t suggest that he is definitely this and therefore definitely not that, you can project what you want onto him. You can fill in the blanks with your own wishes and expectations.

That’s what I meant. If that makes sense to you. And even if it doesn’t, that’s what I meant.

Hey, but don’t go by me. Y’all know I despise both parties so much that I’m always blaming them for all the world’s ills.

Listen to someone who actually wants the GOP to succeed in what it’s trying to do. Someone who is super-irritated with the way Republicans have contrived to make this disaster all about themselves, without any blame slopping over onto Democrats.

I refer to Kimberley Strassel, writing in The Wall Street Journal, where she is a member of the editorial board:

The tragic reality is that this vote isn’t shaping up to be all that perilous for the owners of the law. Nobody is even talking about Democrats. Nobody has put an iota of pressure on them for months. Every camera, every microphone has been trained on the GOP….

That debate was derailed when a rump group in the GOP unilaterally decided to impose “defund” as the broader Republican position. Having moved on their own, their only hope of enforcing support was to deliberately make this fight about Republicans—instead of Democrats. So what began last year as one possible strategy for undercutting the health-care law devolved this summer into a minority-imposed (and bogus) litmus test of conservative purity.

This effort has not, for some time now, been about victory. It has become, as RedState’s Erick Erickson put it with his usual eloquence, about shining a light on the “cockroaches” in the GOP. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has spent months berating his own side as “appeasers” who care only about “being invited to all the right cocktail parties in town.”

Outside conservative groups—Heritage Action, the Senate Conservatives Fund—have raised real cash on this venture, and they’ve spent most of it attacking House and Senate Republicans….

It’s like Democrats don’t exist. In fact, it’s like the issues at stake — health care, overall funding of the government, the faith and credit of the United States, the world economy — don’t exist, either, as far as those precipitating this crisis is concerned.

All that matters to this “rump group” driving events is ideological purity. It’s about smoking out, and “exposing,” the serious-minded Republicans who are not anarchic nihilists. You know, the actual conservatives — the ones who are not bomb-throwers.

We’re accustomed to seeing this kind of thing in South Carolina, where we have more than our share of extreme ideologues. Just ask Lindsey Graham, who is so often their target. He could now say, to the rest of the country, “Welcome to my world.”

I could take pleasure in the collapse from within of one of the major political parties — that would be one down, one to go — but their way of doing it is to bring down the house on all of us.

In light of the likely economic consequences of default, all I can do is hope that someone finds a way out of this trap — even if that means a political party saves itself in the process.

Well, the deadline has passed for joining the bradwarthen.com Walk for Life team — I went this afternoon and picked up the T-shirts for the team.

BUT… that doesn’t mean you can’t still contribute to the effort. And you do want to contribute to the effort, right? As Bryan Caskey said to his friends, the question is, “Cancer: Are You For It or Against It?”

For that matter, if you contribute, you’re more than welcome to walk with the team. Assuming you’re into camaraderie, exercise and all.

Thanks to Bryan and Doug Ross and others (Bryan and Doug having raised more than $1,000 each), our team has now raised $2,724 toward our (new) $3,000 goal. For those of you who don’t know how to use a calculator, that means we have $276 to go.

Let’s not fall short.

To give, just go to this page and click on the “Give Now” button over on the right-hand side.

I’m also told that if you still want to walk, you can register as an individual — they’re just not taking any more team members.

Far as I’m concerned, if you contribute, you’re a team member, whatever the official record says. We’ll be proud to have you walk with us. Or not, if you prefer to give and sleep in that day. Either way. We just want your money.

Silence, my taskmaster, is on me about not having one of these in awhile. Actually, he’s on my case about not blogging enough, period. No posts yesterday. Sorry. Working.

I’ve got a couple of things I’d like to post about later in the day. Something about the pope, and… I forget the other one. It was something fun, I think. Oh, we’ll — it will occur to me again later.

Here’s your chance to blog about what interests YOU — stuff like QE. Or football. Just wait for me on the stuff I like — you know, like the pope thing. Or “Breaking Bad.” Or Elvis Costello. Or going to war in exciting new foreign lands. Y’all know the stuff I like…

Editor’s note: Kevin Fisher called this morning and mentioned that I had failed to provide a link to his column. Which is embarrassing. Mea maxima culpa. Here’s the link (and now each reference to his column below also features a link. Sorry about that, Kevin.

A week ago today, Kevin Fisher gave me another of those phone calls to let me know he would be referring to me in his column that was coming out in the Free Times the next day.

“Uh-oh,” I said. “Am I in trouble?”

Oh, no, nothing like that. He had just liked something I had said earlier this year, so he quoted the headline from that post, “Sheheen makes entirely unobjectionable speech at Energy Summit.” His point in quoting it was to say that Vincent is playing it too safe in his bid to be governor.

I’m glad Kevin liked what I wrote, and it’s true: Vincent doesn’t set the world on fire as a public speaker. Regrettably, I don’t agree with the ultimate point of Kevin’s column, headlined “Sheheen and Gay Marriage — No Guts, No Glory,” which is that Vincent failed to be a stand-up guy when he didn’t reverse himself and come out in favor of same-sex marriage.

Kevin presents a lot of strong-sounding points on his way to that conclusion — that he knows one of the women who filed the lawsuit, and she’s a fine public servant of whom we should all be proud; that Sheheen is the standard-bearer for a party that now identifies itself nationally as favoring same-sex marriage; that Vincent needs to light a fire under his base somehow, and maybe changing his position on this would do it; that it’s not even that politically risky any more to make such a change.

It’s a better-reasoned column than the one by Chris Haire in City Paper the week before, “S.C. Dem Vincent Sheheen says FU to gay marriage in an effort to woo GOPers.” (Apparently, saying “Furman University” is now a faux pas akin to the gratuitous use of the word “Belgium,” and is so rude that initials must be used.) But then, Chris labels his column as containing “biting commentary and rabid rants.” So, he’s just doing his thing.

As I said, Kevin’s is better reasoned, and doesn’t rely on such terms as “yellowbellied.”

But there’s a central flaw in it. It ignores the highly-likely possibility that Vincent Sheheen actually, honestly does not support same-sex marriage. In that case — and until the candidate says something to the contrary, I believe that IS the case — all of those strong-sounding points Kevin makes are countered. The fact that the Highway Patrolwoman Kevin knows is an admirable person who stands up courageously for what she believes in doesn’t mean Vincent is required to believe the same thing. The fact that national leaders of the Democratic Party now support same-sex marriage doesn’t mean Vincent Sheheen has to. The position he holds is the same one Barack Obama, Joe Biden, et al., held a couple of years back. Remember? They were against it before they were for it. Sheheen’s supposed error here is that he still believes now what he believed then. Or he says he does, and I believe him.

And as for the polls, if every other voter in South Carolina now supported same-sex marriage, but Vincent Sheheen disagreed, how would saying he agreed with them make him a stand-up guy? Seems like it would make him the opposite.

Mind you, I’m pinning a lot on the man actually meaning what he says. But I’ve seen no reason to believe that he does not.

Do I think it was Vincent’s finest moment? Nope. But I also believe there was nothing he could have done to make it come out better. It was a no-win situation. He could change his mind on the issue, and invite the culture warriors of the right to paint him as an automaton who lets the national Democratic Party (which, you may have noticed, is not terribly popular here) do his thinking for him. Or he could stick to his position, and dismay and even hurt a lot of people who otherwise would be enthusiastically supporting him. (And frankly, I think it was his aversion to hurting the feelings of good, sincere people who would take his position personally that made him soften the blow by having his campaign manager address it, rather than saying something himself.)

Either way, it’s a mess. In such a situation, he might as well just be honest. Which I’m assuming is the course he chose…

Fully prepared to cringe at what I found, I followed the link in this Tweet yesterday:

Slate (@Slate)

Why is philosophy so hostile to women? slate.me/1evvQfk

And what I found was pretty much what I expected to find. The XXfactor feature at Slate is fairly predictable — the pieces often seem to have been written by a college sophomore who has just discovered feminism and is filled with the zeal of a convert.

There was one part that made sense to me, though. The purpose of the piece was to speculate on why there are even fewer women teaching in the philosophy departments of American academia than in physics. (Maybe Larry Summers would like to offer a theory. Then again, maybe not, since he’s short-listed for a new job.)

Here’s the part that made sense. It’s a quote from this article by Camille Paglia:

I feel women in general are less comfortable than men in inhabiting a highly austere, cold, analytical space, such as the one which philosophy involves. Women as a whole—and there are obvious exceptions—are more drawn to practical, personal matters. It is not that they inherently lack a talent or aptitude for philosophy or higher mathematics, but rather that they are more unwilling than men to devote their lives to a frigid space from which the natural and the human have been eliminated…

That pretty much describes the difference I’ve observed in nearly six decades on the planet. Is it a perfect delineation? No. I know some women who “think like men” in this way (they tend to gravitate toward such professions as the law), and increasingly it seems I run into men who think like women.

And of course, some women become philosophers. But I think Ms. Paglia put her finger on a key reason why more women don’t choose that path.

It’s not, as Paglia notes, that women can’t master philosophy. It’s that they tend to abhor the “frigid space” of pure abstraction. Which, you know, is a point for women on my scoreboard. But then, according to my friend Claudia Brinson, who intended to be kind in calling me this, I’m a “difference feminist.”

The writer of the XXfactor piece wasn’t going for the Paglia explanation:

…(S)he also needlessly drags gender into what seems like an individual preference for pragmatism over abstract-mindedness. If women perceive philosophy as a “frigid space,” it’s probably because they are outnumbered and alienated, not because they consider theoretical musings somehow less “human.” Likewise, the male philosophers propositioning their graduate students appear perfectly comfortable wallowing in the mud of everyday life. If only they had some respect for their medieval counterparts, who chose to personify philosophy as a fair, virtuous woman…

In other words, it’s the fault of those oppressive horndogs running the philosophy departments.

I prefer the more reasonable conclusion, that they perceive philosophy as a “frigid space” not “because they are outnumbered and alienated,” but because that’s what it is — pure thought, floating weightlessly in the ether of abstraction.

Phillip, on another thread, reminded me of Peggy Noonan’s column this morning (or technically, her column tomorrow, since that’s when it appears in print), in which she praised the Pope for his input into the debate over Syria:

After 10 days of debate in Europe and America, the wisest words on a path forward have come from the Pope. Francis wrote this week to Vladimir Putin, as the host of the G-20. He damned “the senseless massacre” unfolding in Syria and pleaded with the leaders gathered in St. Petersburg not to “remain indifferent”—remain—to the “dramatic situation.” He asked the governments of the world “to do everything possible to assure humanitarian assistance” within and without Syria’s borders.

But, he said, a “military solution” is a “futile pursuit.”

And he is right. The only strong response is not a military response.

The world must think—and speak—with stature and seriousness, of the moment we’re in and the darkness on the other side of the door. It must rebuke those who used the weapons, condemn their use, and shun the users. It must do more, in concert—surely we can agree on this—to help Syria’s refugees. It must stand up for civilization.

But a military strike is not the way, and not the way for America.

Francis was speaking, as popes do, on the moral aspects of the situation. In America, practical and political aspects have emerged, and they are pretty clear….

I deeply appreciate the Pope’s intervention into this situation. He’s saying things we need to consider. That’s not saying I’m entirely convinced that we don’t need to act militarily. There are times when force must be used against those who use force against the defenseless.

But I acknowledge that it remains debatable whether this is indeed one of those times. I still think it is, but the Holy Father is making me think even harder about it…

Samuel Tenenbaum and I were talking Syria this morning, and Samuel said if POTUS really, truly wants us to act in Syria, he’ll address the nation about the importance of the proposal passing Congress. If he doesn’t, if he remains in the background, he’s not sufficiently committed to it.

Later this morning, Samuel passed on an update from Politico that said, “President Barack Obama will address the American people on Syria from the White House on Tuesday, he announced Friday.” That prompted Samuel to say, “I think he is going for it !and willing to risk defeat by the whomever.”

Perhaps so. In fact, I think so, and hope so. But for a time this morning — and I had shared this suspicion with Samuel and others — I was wondering whether, by taking the extraordinary step of ask Congress to approve action in Syria, the president was playing out a very subtle gambit designed to extricate the nation from a risky situation with minimum damage to its ability to act in the world in the future.

Here’s the way that thinking went…

I’ve been reading all sorts of indications the last couple of days of the potential fallout from acting against Assad. For instance: we knew that this was very important to the Russians, but not since the Cold War have we had a Russian leader supplying the regime we’re about to strike with weapons in the present tense, and promising, mid-crisis, to continue doing so. Which Putin just did. Not in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else have we faced that sort of risky situation.

Iraq is a mess since we left (which we shouldn’t have done with a Status of Forces agreement going forward, but let’s not argue that right now), and our anticipated action in Syria is expected to further inflame passions among the Shiite majority there for Assad and against the United States. The NYT had a pretty compelling story about that yesterday.

The lede story in the WSJ this morning (“Iran plots revenge“) was about Iran’s threats to attack the U.S. embassy in Iraq and carry out other violent reprisals. Rhetoric, yes. But Iran has a lot of experience in recent years killing Americans and has no compunctions about it. So we have to assume that’s something we’d have to deal with after a Syria strike. Which is why the Navy is getting ready to defend the Strait of Hormuz from an Iranian attack that could cripple the world’s economy.

Note that this morning, the administration ordered nonessential U.S. embassy workers out of Beirut — presumably to protect them from Iran client Hezbollah. And Iraq has moved troops to the Syrian border to brace for what might happen after a U.S. strike.

An American president could not be seen to back down in the face of any of those direct and implied threats. That would be very bad for the president in question, this nation, and the world. But if he gives a compelling case that we should act (which he did last weekend), but then turns responsibility over to the famously ineffective, incompetent and dysfunctional Congress, we end up not acting — but it’s not his fault.

Thus he has (sorta, kinda, in a weak sort of way) stood up for doing the right thing — although a thing that no one expects to have much effect this late in the game — while avoiding a whole series of bad consequences from Russia, Iran, et al.

I really don’t think the president is that manipulative and subtle. So I’ve rejected this line of thinking. But it’s an intriguing one, I think…