War – what is it good for?
For arms companies. For under-pressure political leaders out to mobilise popular opinion on the pretext of patriotism. And for liberal commentators looking to line up with imperial interests while retaining their radical credentials.
Thus the formula: ‘we don’t resile from condemnation of the dreadful things that Donald Trump stands for – but he did the right thing in response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons. To refuse to cheer for the bombing would be tantamount to tacit support for an unspeakable atrocity’.
Let’s leave aside the question of whether the choking to death in Idlib of scores of civilians of all ages can definitely be put down to Assad. Not a sliver of presentable evidence has emerged. Nor have any of the liberal bomb enthusiasts suggested what motive Assad might have had. 
The Damascus dictator is well-capable of barbaric action. But that doesn’t mean he did it. 
Then again, who needs evidence when the point is to set up your enemy for pulverisation? And when you know that a large section of “anti-war” opinion will be making nice with you before the cordite smoke has cleared. 
DOES PUTIN HAVE CLEAN HANDS?
After months of tirades against Trump as a racist, misogynist despoiler of the environment, liberals across Europe and across the Atlantic tripped over one another in their hectic rush to be heard above the hubbub. “Brilliant bit of bomb action there – Well done President Trump, you hateful bastard.” 
 In England, the Guardian, the most pleased-with-itself publication on earth, fielded its full first-team squad of sniffy moralists to explain why decent people mustn’t duck their duty to Donald.    
Trump’s ridiculous spokesman Sean Spicer was laughed to scorn when he told a press conference that Assad was worse than Hitler – at least Hitler hadn’t used chemical weapons. It was quickly pointed out that literally millions of Jews and others had perished from poison gas in the Holocaust. 
 The laughter grew louder when Spicer “clarified” that he’d meant that Hitler hadn’t used chemical weapons in battle, but only in “the Holocaust centres.” 
Outrageous, appalling, contemptible? You bet!
So what are we to make of this: “Firstly, we have to acknowledge that a serious response to the apparent use of nerve gas against civilians by Bashar al-Assad’s regime was a moral and political necessity…” (Note that “apparently”: the article then proceeds as if the phrase had been “definitely”, “irrefutably,” “sure as god made little green apples” or something along the same lines).
“One of the very few good things that can be said about the horrible 20th century and its orgies of mass murder is that some kind of line was drawn. Even the Nazis did not use chemical weapons on the battlefield… Trump did the right thing…”
  That appeared in the Irish Times on April 8th, written by Fintan O’Toole.
 Near-identical quotes are available from a wide range of liberal commentators. The lies, distortions and opportunistic assumptions masquerading as proven fact have been particularly egregious in high-minded broadsheets like the Guardian and the NY Times. The reason for pointing a finger at Fintan and the Irish Times is precisely that, while individuals like Ian O’Doherty of the Indo, for example, can be dismissed for bad syntax, shallow-mindedness and disrespect for mundane fact, most of us will have expected better from Fintan and the IT.
 Does Putin have clean hands? No. The difference is that Putin isn’t being promoted in our media day in and day out as someone who, in this instance at least, can be taken as a reliable teller of truth.
PHOTOSHOPPED IMAGES
 And talking of Trump, truth and the contemporary American way…
 Julia Ioffe has been fired by Politico for tweeting a comment about the appointment of Trump’s daughter Ivanka to a powerful position in the White House and the appearance of photographs of father and daughter kissing and cuddling in a manner which might draw the reaction “Ahh!” or, alternatively, “Ugh!”
 “Either Trump is fucking his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?” wondered the Jewish Ms. Ioffe, reasonably. 
The relevance of Ioffe’s religion arises from responses to her less-than-flattering – but by no means hatchet-job – profile of Melania Trump in GQ a couple of months back. Ms. Ioffe was deluged in letters, ‘phone calls, tweets and Facebook posts with recordings of Hitler speeches, photoshopped images of her in striped pyjamas with a Yellow Star affixed, a cartoon of a caricature Jew being shot in the head, and descriptions of her as, for example, a “filthy Russian kike.”
Asked to comment, Melania declared: “I don’t control my fans…but she provoked them.”
Husband Donald added: “I don’t have a message to the fans…A woman wrote an article that was inaccurate.” He hadn’t read it but had heard that it was “nasty.”
Fans? That’s the Trumps’ take on his supporters?
 But of course, “fan” coming, after all, from “fanatic.”
BANG ON TIME
Three hours plus on a bus, what’s to do?
You know the way you realise with a twinge of guilt that you’ve had a bunch of CDs for months that you haven’t properly listened to? 
Ports’ The Devil is a Songbird, Conor Mason’s Standstill, Christian McNeill’s Trapped on Planet One, Paul Casey’s After The Harvest, the sublime Johanna Fegan’s Cutting Out The Noise. 
That’s what to do. I cursed the fact that we reached Busaras bang on time.
Hopefully, there’ll be normal service next time.