Pirate's Cove

Salon: no one can touch our crazy piece on Trump’s post chemical weapon bombing.

The Nation: hold our fancy pants wine glass. (via Twitchy)

The Other Poison Gas Killing Syrians: Carbon Dioxide Emissions https://t.co/69Sw0uUCEv

— The Nation (@thenation) April 18, 2017

Here’s Excitable Juan Cole’s insanity

The gas attack in Syria on April 4 consumed the world’s attention and galvanized the Trump White House, leading to the launch of 59 cruise missiles on a small airport from which the regime of Bashar al-Assad has been bombing the fundamentalist rebels in Idlib Province. The pictures of suffering children, Trump said, had touched him. Yet the president and most of his party are committed to increasing the daily release of hundreds of thousands of tons of a far more deadly gas. And that is carbon dioxide. Climate scientist James Hansen has described our current emissions as like setting off 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs each day, every day of the year.

The screed really doesn’t get any better after that first paragraph. Cole attempts to lay the blame, or at least link, the ongoing war and refugee crisis to Mankind’s output of CO2. And that the CO2 is causing all sorts of problems around the Middle East, and, shockingly, causing drought in an area that is known to be rather hot and desert-like. Props to Cole, though, for at least consistently referring to it as CO2, rather than the un-scientific “carbon pollution”.

The crazy continues, ending with

As Representative Keith Ellison has pointed out, some two-thirds of Syrian refugees are women and children, and fully one-third of them are under the age of 12. The world was shocked in September 2015, at the image of little Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, having failed to make it to a Greek island. Aylan was a Syrian refugee, not only from war, but from climate change. Trump and the climate-destroyers he brought into office with him such as Rex Tillerson and Scott Pruitt are not driven by compassion for victims. They are animated by a callous and rapacious search for profits for themselves and their cronies. If they cared about children killed by noxious gases, they wouldn’t want to ban Syrian refugees like the Kurdis from the United States. Nor would they want to spew ever more tons of the most noxious gas of all into the blue skies of the only planetary home the human race has.

Noxious! Plants, trees, bushes, and plankton I interviewed all said “preposterous!”