A Thought on the Syrian Opposition

Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren (for a few more days), has one, which he offered in an interview with the Jerusalem Post:

The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted [President] Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran. … We understand that they are pretty bad guys.  Still, the greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut.  And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc.  That is a position we had well before the outbreak of hostilities in Syria.  With the outbreak of hostilities we continued to want Assad to go.

Would that our own national leadership, including a President who’s a better policy guy than his policy guys, had such clarity of thought.

Because Stuff Happens

Another seemingly mendacious defense of Obamacare.  Congressman Jackie Speier (D, CA) decries objections to unqualified or even unvetted Obamacare “Navigators” having access to individual Americans’ health and financial data.  Speier dismisses the concerns as just a

systematic effort by some Republican state officials to obstruct implementation of the Affordable Care Act[.]

She’s joined by HHS spokesman Brian Cook, who insists,

The navigator program is similar to Medicare counselors, which have existed for years and never faced this kind of criticism from Congress.  The shameful and unprecedented attempt by some in Congress to bully and intimidate these private organizations is clearly an ideologically driven attempt to prevent uninsured Americans from gaining health coverage.

Never mind that personal medical and financial data weren’t so easily hacked into when Medicare was being gutsed up.  Hey, stuff happens, and we should just live with it.

Wrong.  These people know stuff happens, and they should be getting in the way of it, not excusing it.