Thursday we heard from the networks that the Obama administration has bought the French and British ‘discovery’ and now believes the Syrian forces had used Sarin, a form of WMD. No sooner was this news on the networks than they shifted to the Senate floor; that McCain and Graham were going to deliver the speeches that Obama or Jay Carney should have delivered. No doubt the networks were alerted by McCain and Graham, hoping to force Obama’s hand and to spin the news the way they prefer. Effectively they tried to hijack the administration’s foreign policy on Syria and the wider Middle East. Before the administration announced the news, the two senators declared it and detailed what policy the US government is going to follow and should follow.
The news was that the administration now believes that the Syrians used Sarin on “several occasions” and that between “100 to 150” people died. Nobody seems to have thought about this last fact: used “several time” and killed just over “100”. Now what kind of weapons of MASS destruction is used to kill only a handful of people each time? All that was lost in the noise all over the media and the social media. The social media are smarter, because average people can now opine and average people are smarter (on average) than the news-hungry media types. Most of the doubt over this new shift was expressed in the social media.

Cheers
mhg