Turkey Totally Loses Its Cool Over Syria

By Eric Margolis

Play with fire, and you will get burned. A mortar shell fired from Syria by either government troops or rebels as a provocation killed five Turkish villagers on the border. Turkish heavy artillery riposted, killing Syrian soldiers. Turkey's parliament authorized military action against Syria. One could almost hear the thunder of the great Ottoman war drums that heralded the arrival of the sultan's armies and his fierce Janissary warriors……Meanwhile, the besieged Assad regime in Damascus has lost control of a northern border region inhabited by 2 million ethnic Kurds who have become autonomous. Ankara, which faces a virtual independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq and its own long-simmering uprising by its Kurdish minority, is deeply alarmed by the specter of Kurdish nationalism…….By fueling Syria's civil war, Erdogan has kicked the Kurdish hornet's nest……Now, Syria bodes ill for all involved…..Syria could very well prove a curse for Turkey and a drain on its resources…..polls show a majority of Turks oppose Erdogan's Syria interventionist policies as dangerous and unnecessary. Foes on the left accuse Erdogan of restoring Turkey's Cold War role as America's policeman in the Mideast. Others see a secret plan by Ankara to restore Ottoman-era rule over Syria. France is also stirring the pot in Syria, eager to reassert its former influence in the Levant. America wants to stick its finger in Iran's eye….To Read the Entire Article…  

My Take – Do you really believe you could learn all of this by watching the news?  Do you believe you could learn all of this by reading the newspapers?  There is a reason the main stream news media are taking a dive.  Everything they say is are lies.  Mostly lies of omission, but they have been guilty of fudging the news in order to get people to believe things that simply aren’t true.  In reality that isn’t anything new. 

In days gone by the newspapers were far worse than today…..but the difference was there were many more newspapers in every city, each equally outrageous and equally partisan….on both sides.  During the John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson Presidential election the newspapers printed material that was so outrageous it is hard to believe they had any conscience at all. 

In Cleveland we had three major papers in my memory; the Plain Dealer, the Press and the News, which was later bought by the Press.  To show just how bad a newspaper can be; the trial and conviction of Dr. Sam Sheppard can be placed right at the feet of the Cleveland Press and its publisher Louie B. Seltzer, by their goading of local officials and “pre-trial publicity” which so clearly contaminated the jury pool that a conviction was assured.  I still to this day don’t believe Sheppard was guilty.    

Most newspapers are nothing short of liberal rags, including the Plain Dealer, a seven day a week morning edition, which I am expecting to go to two or three days a week soon.  I buy the paper to do the crossword puzzle, scan the local propaganda and try and see what they leave out about the Browns.  I don’t care about the other sports.   Now the newspapers are un-fixable because people have gone elsewhere for their news….and they like it. 

As for the TV news media…..Fox is only just a little better than the rest.    

As a side bar. 

I had a friend who knew Seltzer. He told me he saw him in downtown Cleveland one day after Seltzer retired.  They talked for a while and he asked Seltzer how he liked retirement.  Seltzer told him that when he was the publisher of the Press everyone wanted to know him, shake his hand, hear what he had to say and everyone wanted to get his attention…...and now..... he's lucky if they wave at him from across the street.  I always thought that was a great story on life.   

Moral of that story?  They don’t read your resume at the funeral.