Serious Seriousness Watch

(BUMPED)

Did John McCain, running to be leader of the free world, really say that the Straits of Hormuz "incident" was a serious situation of the utmost seriousness? Really?

And by the way, if this doesn't prove the recklessness of the Administration or the Pentagon or whoever leaked this routine incident and scared it all up with voices that bore no relationship to the incident itself, I don't know what does. This will now be another zombie lie buried deep in the conservative brain, and anyone making the case for war with Iran will certainly add "and they attacked our ships in the Straits of Hormuz." It'll jump all the way to that conclusion.

This is how wars start. Years and years of little things in the background.

And it's sick that the racist homophobe is the voice of reason in the Republican Party.

Guess what, today the Navy commander of the fifth fleet was on ABC and announced that, “you know, that voice might not have come from those vessels.” So what does that mean? Was there a rush to judgment on this, ready to go to war? … And we don’t need another war, and this incident should not be thrown out of proportion to the point where we’re getting ready to attack Iran over this.

That will be buried under the weight of history.

UPDATE: Russell Walter Mead:

From the 18th century to the present day, threats to American ships and maritime commerce have been the way most U.S. wars start. The pattern began early. Attacks by the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean led President Thomas Jefferson to send the U.S. Navy thousands of miles on a risky expedition to suppress the threat to American merchant ships in 1801....The widespread (though probably erroneous) U.S. belief that the USS Maine had been destroyed by a Spanish mine in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, forced a reluctant President William McKinley to launch the Spanish-American War in 1898....The Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964 (alleged attacks on U.S. ships by North Vietnamese boats) led Congress to authorize President Lyndon Johnson's use of force in Indochina.

Exactly. Even in this age of technology we don't have a Chopper 6 out in the Persian Gulf. We have to rely on the Defense Department for this kind of information, and we have to rely on the President and his staff to put it in the proper context. This has been a familiar historical pattern.