monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

It appears I may have misunderstood your post.

I agree with Waldman although I never thought I would ever write those words.

I'm sure Trump was moved by the photos he saw.

The man is not a monster despite the hyperbolic idiocy of some of his critics

the primary reasons for the US strike do not include avenging slain babies.

Why is it more moral to bomb these same kids with conventional bombs? Why is a chemical weapon less moral than American cluster bombs with radiation pellets?

I still don't see how the cluster bombs that scatter radiation pellets can be considered less criminal than chemical weapons. Except that America uses them, may be the reason.

Anybody, including our own state actors, could've gassed Syrians.

“It’s not hard to make sarin. You could mix it in the backyard. Two chemicals melded together.” — Seymour Hersh interviewed on CNN, December 9, 2013. The idea that the chemical warfare agent, sarin, is easy to make is central to Seymour Hersh’s claim that the August 21 attacks killing hundreds of Syrians could have been carried out by the rebel group, the Al Nusra Front.

Hersh’s backyard sarin production appears to be concocted from fiction.

The only non-state actor known to have engaged in large-scale sarin production was the Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo. They invested $30 million in this endeavor which included the creation of a production facility.

The plant was a free-standing three-story building, staffed by workers with chemistry and chemical-engineering expertise who designed and built proper process controls. It was a complex, expensive operation, and its production capacity was approximately 2 gallons of sarin per batch.

Dan Kaszeta, a former officer in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and former member of the U.S. Secret Service, estimates that the August attack would have required one ton of sarin — far more than Aum Shinrikyo was able to produce even with their dedicated facility.

Amy E. Smithson, a researcher on chemical and biological weapons at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, who investigated the Aum Shinrikyo attacks in Japan emphasized that in assessing the capacity of non-state actors to use chemical weapons there is a huge gulf between the “theoretical possibility” and the “operational reality.”

But by almost any standard, Aum Shinrikyo’s chemical weapons program, and an earlier attempt to develop biological agents, failed to produce anything close to the killing power the group desired.

In Aum Shinrikyo’s first attempt to attack a rival group by spraying sarin gas from a moving van, Smithson notes, “the sprayer completely malfunctioned and sprayed backwards.” The second attempt ended up exposing the group’s security chief to the toxic nerve agent.

Most experts believe that 90 percent of any agent sprayed outdoors will not reach its intended targets in lethal form, given the vagaries of temperature, sunlight, wind and rain.

The Russian, obviously, hoped to influence our election just as we, undoubtedly, try and influence elections around the world. Obama did it openly and with tax dollars as respects Israel.

Why they may have preferred Trump over Clinton can be explained in many ways other than "They have him on their strings."

On that we'd disagree. I think he's some degree of sociopath. Trump University being just one of many pieces of evidence.

Who makes the Tomahawk missiles? Answer: Raytheon. Who owns stock in Raytheon? Trump.

You are a late comer to the critics of the Rules of War, and you know it.

Land mines are a horrific method of warfare that continues to kill and main long after the conflict.

Who are your favorite presidents blatham? You know, the non-monsters?
Obama, FDR, Wilson, LBJ?

Progressive activists say they’re dismayed that senior congressional Democrats aren’t more strongly condemning President Donald Trump’s strikes against Syria on Thursday night.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called punishing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad “the right thing to do,” and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) labeled the strikes a “proportional response.”

But left-wing organizers want Schumer and Pelosi pushing back more strongly. “We are calling on all congressional leaders to call for emergency deliberations on Trump’s illegal escalation in Syria. Anything short of that will show that Democrats are completely out of touch with the base of their party.”

“[Democrats] haven’t done nearly enough — they need to explicitly call out that this was a reckless military action that does not make us more safe...

Anything short of that will show that Democrats are completely out of touch with the base of their party.”

What makes Trump unique is that he made his administration a family affair.