It really says something about the sheer uselessness of the Canadian Senate that they can’t even keep an accurate track of how much money their members are stealing.

Senator Mac Harb, a former Liberal who was expelled resigned from his party a couple weeks ago following revelations that he had charged the Senate some $51,282 in undeserved travel and lodging expenses, had his infamy upgraded by several points last week after the Senate’s internal economy committee took a second look at the numbers and determined that no, the figure is actually probably closer to $230,000. And just like that, Senator Harb, previously one of the least offensive characters among the gang of high-profile senators caught with their hands in the expense account cookie jar, including Patrick Brazeau ($48,744) Mike Duffy ($90,172.) and Pamela Wallin ($38,000 and counting) is suddenly bumped to first place. What’s particularly charming is that these revised estimates actually claim Harb owes nearly as much in sheer interest ($41,726) on his outstanding ill-gotten claims as he was initially expected to owe overall.

This scandal — the so-called “Senate Expense Account controversy” — continues to loom large in the Canadian papers, and I’ve been on TV a bunch of times attempting to come up with new and clever insights on it. But at the end of the day, it’s really not a very complicated thing, and as the weeks progress it’s getting harder and harder to dredge up any fresh takes. It’s just such an awful, offensive scandal predictably arising from our most awful, offensive political institution. What more can be said?

If you bill your employer for phony expenses or file legit expenses under false pretenses (as Harb did when he dipped into the Senate’s housing and travel allowances for senators who live more than 100 km from parliament, despite his living only 40km away) then you’re basically a thief. I can actually remember once working at a place where we fired an employee who simply tried to file a expense that was only a couple bucks over the authorized limit — the boss said he was lucky we didn’t call the cops. That’s just how things go in most normal workplaces.

The cops have been called on the rouge Senate gang thankfully, but as I noted in an earlier post, it’s unclear if any jobs will be lost as a result. Canadian senators are appointed by prime ministers for what amount to life terms, and to repeat yet again, they can’t be fired, only impeached following conviction for an indictable offense (which has never happened in Canadian history). Harb will continue to collect his $135,000 paycheque for the time being, and even if he decides to quit, his ample senatorial pension will surely cushion his fall from grace. But considering he’s recruited a former Supreme Court justice to contest his charges, even that might not be necessary.

Two of the three main political parties in Canada are in favor of Senate reform. The NDP is on an abolishment tour at the moment, while the Tory government of Prime Minister Harper is waiting patiently to hear back from the Supreme Court of Canada on what’s called a “constitutional reference” on Senate reform, which is to say their opinion as to whether or not it would be constitutional for the federal government to unilaterally pass a law forcing Canada’s senators to be subject to elections and term limits.

The Liberal Party, meanwhile, thinks the problem isn’t so much a prime ministerially-appointed senate, but prime ministers who make bad appointments. This was probably an easier case for them to make when the chamber’s most sticky-fingered member appeared to be Mike Duffy; perhaps a bit harder now that the honor belongs to Harb, a 2003 Jean Chretien appointee. In a similar theme, the long-reigning Liberal parties of Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia have all consistently refused to undermine the status quo by holding Senate elections (Alberta remains the only province that does) or otherwise press Ottawa to get the ball rolling on any larger cause of reform. And considering the vital role Canada’s provincial governments play in fomenting constitutional change in this country, it’s hard to imagine how anything will get fixed so long as our three biggest regions continue to abdicate their responsibility.

Really, the only conceivable way Canada’s ever going to escape its abusive relationship with its most dysfunctional political institution will be if we get a prime minister (be it Conservative or NDP) who’s willing to put all of the nation’s other business on hold, and just devote 100% of his energy to pitching comprehensive Senate reform all day, every day, for a solid couple of weeks, if not months. The public would have to be whipped into a literal frenzy of anger and outrage over the status quo (which most polls suggest we already are — we just never get a chance to express it), every provincial government would have to be brought under enormous pressure, and there’d have to be some manner of extraordinary national referendum to finally bring definitive closure — whether it was retooling, abolishment, or what — to this tired debate once and for all.

Anything less, well… How’ve the last five years been working out?

How about the last 150?

The NSA/PRISM spying scandal that broke late last week has been so awash in sensationalism and intrigue it’s been more than a tad difficult separate fact from fiction.

So here’s what we do know:

A couple months ago, the United States National Security Agency ordered the phone company Verizon (and several of its competitors, it’s widely assumed), to hand over all records of all its customers’ phone calls, every day, until July 19. Verizon had no choice but to comply; the NSA had an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the institution of the US government with the power to authorize any act of invasive surveillance conducted in the name of national security.

The info Verizon’s been turning over is said to be basically the same as what we see on our phone bills — a complete chronology of the numbers each customer is calling, plus how often, how long, and from where. The government doesn’t get access to any actual conversations or names, which is why some call this kind of stuff “meta-data” — information that almost tells you something useful, but requires a lot of detective work to get there. This is controversy number one.

Controversy number two is the so-called PRISM program. Very few hard facts are known about it, but according to a leaked government slide show, the NSA also has some sort of scheme in place to obtain user data — photos and videos and posts and messages and whatnot — from the servers of all our favorite websites, including Facebook, Gmail, and Skype. Unlike the Verizon thing, which captures the phone records of everyone in the country, PRISM spying is supposed to only monitor the accounts of suspicious non-Americans. Or at the very least Americans conversing with a suspicious foreigner.

But all the companies in question deny they’re actually cooperating with PRISM, and as Alex Fitzpatrick noted on Mashable, what we do or don’t know about the thing is “seemingly changing by the hour.”

The details of both programs were exposed by a young CIA contract worker named Edward Snowden, who leaked a bunch of top secret NSA documents to Glen Greenwald, who is this far-left American dissident type character who lives in exile in Brazil and writes for the British newspaper The Guardian. Glenn Greenwald feels a lot of his pre-existing opinions about the sinister motives of the American government have been confirmed by Snowden’s leaks. And certainly lots of folks on social media and talk radio and cable chat shows seem to agree.

Snowden himself seems like a fairly unimpressive guy. The New Yorker‘s Jeff Toobin, for instance, calls him “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.” For all his self-proclaimed virtue as a heroic whistle-blower, after all, nothing about either the phone snooping or PRISM program he revealed seems to be illegal.

Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, the executive branch has pretty sweeping powers to snoop away as they please, providing they can get clearance from the Foreign Intelligence Court (which doesn’t seem hard). Congress has repeatedly voted to either authorize or reauthorize these powers with bipartisan approval, and most people who have been paying attention to such things over the last couple of years (including, one would hope, CIA employees) would be aware that for good or ill, the pro-spying arguments have consistently won the day. Even now, public support for phone snooping as anti-terrorism measure sits at around 56%.

What Snowden did, therefore, was simply attempt to sabotage two government programs from the inside because, as Toobin put it, they “failed to meet his own standards of propriety.” But whatever. Snowden will go to jail and the surveillance propriety “debate,” in the words of the President, is now back on.

During the most heated moments of the Obamacare battle I remember having a conversation with a friend who was quite incredulous — as numerous Canadians then were — that so many Americans were apparently willing to sacrifice the practical good of heavily subsidized, universally accessible health care in favor of the abstract principle of “small government.”

Canadians receive the bulk of their health insurance from massive state-run bureaucracies, and attend hospitals run by government appointees. All of my personal health information — my medical conditions, past operations, prescriptions, and whatnot — are thus in the hands of “the government,” in some form or another. I assume there are privacy regulations declaring how such data should be handled, but who knows. At some point, the people of Canada calculated that sacrificing our right to conceal some of our most intimate personal information from the scrutiny of the state was a fair trade for the sort of public good that a government-run health care monopoly supposedly provides.

All laws encroach on our personal liberty in some way, that’s why they’re laws. The question poised by the NSA regime is the same well-worn question Americans have been fretting over endlessly since 9-11 itself: is the threat of terrorism severe enough to justify the encroachments on constitutional rights demanded by the domestic security establishment? Even when said encroachments are more bothersome in theory than day-to-day practice?

If you’re a guy like Glen Greenwald (and, one assumes, Edward Snowden) who basically thinks the threat of terrorism is an elaborate fiction cooked up by the American ruling class to suppress domestic dissent and provide cover for wars of imperialism abroad, then the answer is obviously no. If you fear Islamists under every bed, then the answer’s probably yes. If you’re a normal person, you’re probably somewhat conflicted and can probably see both sides, which is probably why this issue is shaping to be one that doesn’t divide the public with any consistent ideological or partisan logic.

So where do you stand?

But one thing I can get motivated for is my big new exciting project, which I have been working on for a while with longtime Filibuster loyalist Jeremy Turcotte.

It’s called Did You Know Politics and it’s a Tumblr in the style of some of those other DYK Tumblrs out there. Every post shares some quirky or interesting fact about global politics. Jeremy and I wrote a ton of these together, so there should be no shortage of posts for a while.

But, I’m always interested in soliciting trivia from readers! If you know any particularly fun or quirky political anecdotes or factoids don’t hesitate to share them in the comments below, or whenever the fancy strikes you on Tumblr.

In the wake of my recent Obama-bashing, I reckon I should note that I was actually quite impressed by the President’s much ballyhooed May 23 speech on the future of the War on Terror. The video is about an hour long, and I highly recommend watching it. It has the air of one of the defining moments of his presidency.

Indeed, it was very much the President at his best. Thoughtful, intellectual, and most of all aware. Aware of the arguments of his critics on both the left and right, aware that many feel the trademarks of his approach to national security — drone strikes and targeted killings, even against American citizens — go too far, while other efforts — such as his famously bungled attempts to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay — don’t go far enough.

Much scorn has been heaped on the “Code Pink” protester that somehow managed to repeatedly interrupt Obama’s speech with long anti-war monologues, but in some ways she was a fitting symbol of the entire event. Smiling politely, Obama clearly found her boring and shrill, yet with every outburst, he cautioned his audience to take her seriously, and not be overly dismissive. Because it was critics like her whom he was at least partially seeking to rebuke — at times through an almost Socratic dialogue.

Those Mideast civilians killed by American power are not mere collateral damage, he said, but real human beings whose deaths “will haunt us as long as we live.” Which is why he’s turned to drones — the technology with the best track record of preventing them, not to mention the long-term perils associated with traditional tactics of invasion and occupation.

“Remember,” he added, “the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes.” In other words, the military technique that’s become most synonymous with American militaristic excess is actually its most feasible alternative.

When it comes to targeting American citizens committing terror abroad, the President similarly sought to “dismiss some of the more outlandish claims” and repeated that “I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen — with a drone, or with a shotgun — without due process,” while also affirming that in moments of imminent danger, one’s “citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team.”

But beyond such unapologetic defenses of first-strike principles, it was really quite a liberal speech, at least in the sense it attempted to portray the war-weary policies of the Obama White House as distinct, and indeed, contrary to the war-happy eight years of the Bush administration.

The importance of addressing the sociological root causes of terror loomed large, for example. (Any comprehensive anti-terror strategy must address “the underlying grievances and conflicts that feed extremism,” namely “poverty and sectarian hatred”). And there was even a call for increased foreign aide (“fundamental to any sensible long-term strategy to battle extremism.”)

At other times, the President veered into existential questions about the entire conceit of the War on Terror itself.

“We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root,” he warned, nor will “every collection of thugs that labels themselves ‘al Qaeda’ pose a credible threat to the United States.” Likewise, “in the absence of a strategy that reduces the wellspring of extremism, a perpetual war — through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments — will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.”

To that end, he concluded, while “our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations” must continue, “this war, like all wars, must end.” That, in turn, will require “efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal,” the quintessential legislative piece of the post-9/11 world order known as AUMF, or the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, that entrusts the executive branch with “all necessary and appropriate” powers to “prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.”

It was that statement that made his speech one for the history books. Overturn AUMF and you’ve basically concluded the war on global jihad, or at the very least eliminated the legal legitimacy justifying everything from housing prisoners in Gitmo to bombings shacks in Yemen. It was an admission that the war Americans — and the world — have to come to accept as inevitable and permanent need not be. It was leadership.

Not everything the President said was brilliant or wise, of course. The bit about root causes and poverty was particularly naive, since the purported links between financial indigence and violent extremism have been widely discredited by numerous terrorism experts.

It’s similarly a deeply open question as to whether or not dissolving the AUMF or otherwise formally ending the terror war would really alter much of the overzealous security state that Obama purports to find so troubling. Henrik Hertzberg wrote an excellent piece in the New Yorker recently about the sheer size and magnitude of the post-9/11 anti-terror establishment — “more than three thousand government organizations and associated private companies working on counter-terrorism, homeland security, and intelligence, in ten thousand locations” with spending budgets in the billions. Ratcheting back any of that — which is to say, slimming down the bloated bureaucratic systems that manage the “systematic efforts” the President spoke of — could make closing Gitmo look like a breeze — which is probably why the topic didn’t come up.

Still, for those of us who’ve been justifiably skeptical over the last few years of Obama’s lead-from-behind management style, and a foreign policy that often appeared as unaccountable and unprincipled as it did arbitrary and disinterested, last month’s speech serves as a reminder there remains at least one realm in which — for better or worse — the President clearly knows what he’s doing.

Or at least knows why he’s doing.

On Wednesday morning, Minnesota Congresswoman and House Tea Party chair Michele Bachmann announced she would not be seeking re-election in 2014. Two days later, her would-be Democratic opponent, businessman Jim Graves, announced he would be stepping down as well.

“There’s no way anyone could run and win who would be worse than Michele Bachmann,” he said happily.

Bachmann was one of those figures who omnipresence in the headlines seemed to be inversely correlated with how much she actually accomplished. Her presidential campaign was a flop. Her gratuitous 2011 Tea Party rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union was a flop. Her attempt to position herself as a major player in the legislative process — an ideologically impeachable center of authority to rival Speaker John Boehner and the rest of the squish crowd — was a flop. As one wag put it, Bachmann’s single, indisputable achievement during her seven years on the national scene was limited to her 2011 victory in the Iowa straw poll, which forced fellow Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty out of the 2012 GOP primary and allowed Governor Romney to consolidate the moderate conservative vote. Or something.

Bachmann is often compared to Sarah Palin for lazy and sexist reasons, but in my estimation the two women actually embody vastly different political styles. Palin, for all her obvious faults, was a genuine populist with some talents for charm and empathy. Her dopey bluntness and clumsy language had a purpose — she was just a simple small town mom with an instinctive sense of right and wrong, gosh-darn-it. She didn’t read the newspapers or have an Ivy League diploma or pal around in Europe or any of it, but that was the point. Washington was run by pointy-headed elites who did, and, well, look where they took the country.

Bachmann, by contrast, tried to be a pointy-headed elite for her own side. Her speeches and rhetoric were closer in style to Glenn Beck (one of her biggest fans), in the sense they used a thin veneer of pseudo-intellectual conservative philosophy to weave hysterically overreactive conspiracy theories with very little provocation. She understood the basic rightist principle that unchecked government power is the root of tyranny — which is true — but applied the thesis so universally and without nuance she became a  clown.

And a liar. According to the Washington Post‘s cute metric of measuring such things, “no other lawmaker earned as high a percentage of Four-Pinocchio ratings as Bachmann,” thanks to her “consistent and unapologetic” bending of reality in the service of ideology.

The President wanted more young people to partake in community service, Bachmann said that he was trying to create “re-education camps.” The United States voted in favor of a UN resolution on combating religious intolerance, Bachmann said Hillary Clinton was imposing a one-world tyranny to prevent criticism of Islam. Obamacare sought to cover birth control, Bachmann said we were headed for a one-child policy.

There was very little about Bachmann that was compelling or attractive. She was cold, angry, paranoid, and fundamentalist, and her political career sought to make those emotions the defining disposition of American political discourse.

Her unpopularity, powerlessness, and now departure hopefully signals a country moving in the opposite direction.

Rare is the day when a Canadian political scandal makes international news. In fact, never is the day when a Canadian political scandal makes international news. Rob Ford is a pioneer!

Mr. Ford is of course the Tea Party-style populist mayor of Toronto, who’s also the biggest tabloid star in the world right now thanks to Gawker’s recent (alleged) discovery of a video of him smoking crack cocaine. The film, which has also been viewed by two journalists from the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest-circulation daily, is currently in the hands of a couple of inner-city Somali-Canadian drug dealers, who Gawker editor John Cook has been trying to pay off for the last week or so. His “crackstarter” pledge drive recently passed the druggies’ $200,000 ask, but alas, Cook seems to have lost contact with them. C’mon guys, don’t be like this, I’m ready to make a deal, says Cook.

Obviously a lot of light-hearted merriment has been had at the embattled mayor’s expense over all of this, in part because Ford is a strange-looking, eccentric buffoon who’s easy to point and laugh at (especially when giving sweaty, strangely-worded non-denial denial press conferences), and in part because there’s always been a considerable portion of the Toronto politico-media establishment that’s loathed the guy for his right-wing politics and prayed for his downfall.

Yet the fundamentals of this story are hardly a laughing matter. The mayor of Canada’s largest city may very well be an addict of one of the most vicious and destabilizing hard drugs available. His addiction may be helping finance murders, both here and abroad. It’s been suggested that one of Ford’s underworld associates was Anthony Smith, who was recently murdered in a gang shooting, and although details on this story are hazy and contradictory, apparently the Toronto Police are currently seeking the crack video as part of some manner of possible homicide investigation. This is the dirty world substance abuse takes you.

Mayor Ford has very obviously lost his moral authority to govern, and with staffers ditching ship left and right, he may soon lose his literal ability to govern, too. It’s a monstrous, slow-motion car crash. But we should be very clear that the whole thing is a tragedy, not a farce.

It’s been a hell of a week for anyone following North American politics. The festering scandals on both sides of the border are too numerous and complex for me to summarize at the moment, so here’s a toon that tries. See how many references you can spot.

The reason I don’t have time to write a full essay for this toon is because I’m too busy getting ready for my appearance at the big fancy Vancouver Comic Arts Festival this weekend. It’s going to be my second-ever comic convention appearance, and I’m gonna have a ton of cool Filibuster-themed stuff for sale, including some cool brand new merch I designed specially for the show.

On Saturday I’m also going to be giving a talk with my good buddy Matt Bors on the future of editorial cartooning in North America. It’ll no doubt be a real fiesta of insight and cynicism.

Anyway, if it’s at all within your power, you should totally come visit me. VanCAF is completely free to attend, and it’s housed in the Roundhouse centre in scenic Yaletown. Thing runs from 10 am to 6 pm on Saturday, May 25, and then 11 am to 5 pm on Sunday the 26th.

See you there!

The Constitution of Canada is an obtuse and badly-written document, but at least one clause seems to be clear enough. When the prime minister goes around picking senators to represent Canada’s 10 provinces, declares Article IV, sec. 23 (5), they “shall be resident in the Province for which he is appointed.”

A few clauses later, however, things begin to get a bit tricky. A “Senator shall not be deemed to have ceased to be qualified in respect of Residence by reason only of his residing at the Seat of the Government of Canada while holding an Office under that Government requiring his Presence there,” clarifies 31 (5). Translated into 21st century English, the Constitution is clarifying that it’s okay if a senator from, say, Vancouver elects to purchase a condo in Ottawa rather than rack up enormous plane bills flying back-and-forth every time there’s a vote.

But despite this constitutional concession, some Senators still felt commuting was a ritual too important to concede. They need to visit their constituents and so forth, even though they don’t actually have any constituents on account of the fact that no one ever elected them. (Indeed, I question if any Canadian, anywhere, has ever even met his or her senator before. I’m not even being facetious — post in the comments if you have, because I’m genuinely curious about the context).

Anyhow, in 1985 the Senate stuck some amendments on the Parliament of Canada Act allowing the government to front “reasonable travel and living expenses” of any senator patriotic enough to maintain a “primary residence” in whatever far-away province they were appointed to represent. Many senators quickly opted-in.

There was no monitoring or enforcement to ensure senators were living where they said they were, or even a hard and fast definition of what precisely constituted a “primary residence” (as opposed to some other kind) in the first place. There was only the honour system, but that was okay since Canadian senators are all valiant men of honour. And maintaining that consistent standard of honour is why they can never be elected, see.

Late last year some journalists began to suspect the system was being abused. Near as I can tell, this was mostly the result of Prime Minister Harper’s 2008 decision to appoint noted Ottawa journalist Mike Duffy to the Senate. Duffy, who was picked to represent the tiny province of Prince Edward Island, quickly opted into the living-outside-of-Ottawa slush fund, claiming more than $33,000 in absentee living allowances, which naturally caused all his journalist buddies in the capital region to call BS. Nice try, Duffy, but we all see you at the supermarket, they said.

In February Duffy fessed up, claiming he had found the Senate’s demand he accurately state which  which province he lives in “confusing,” and promptly paid back all his ill-obtained allowances (though breaking news informs us he was only able to do this via a loan secured from the Prime Minister’s chief of staff).

The Duffy scandal (followed by a similar controversy about the living circumstances of Liberal senator Marc Harb, plus perennial tabloid darling, Senator Patrick Brazeau) prompted the Senate to stage a comprehensive audit of all contentious senatorial residency claims, and the report came back this week.

The findings? The three embattled senators had pocketed a combined total of over $200,000 in illegitimate out-of-province fees since being appointed. According to Kelly McParland in the National Post, “none of the three spent even a third of their time in the home they claimed as their main residence,” with Senator Brazeau in particular only spending 10% of the last year in his Quebec “home.”

Following the report’s release, Senator Harb was expelled from — er “quit,” Liberal Party — and has, along with Brazeau pledged to fight the charges on Duffianian grounds of confusion. The RCMP now says it will get involved, as well it should, since it’s hard to imagine any other Canadian claiming tens of thousands of dollars of work expenses on false pretenses without the cops getting involved.

But if the legal destiny of the men remains unclear, one thing that decidedly ain’t is the senators’ political futures. Unless they choose to freely resign out of shame, there’s almost no way they can be removed from office. The Prime Minister has no power to fire them, and under the rules of the Constitution, the Senate itself can only vote to expel if they get convicted of an “infamous crime,” which subsequent legislation has clarified to mean an indictable offense, as in, something extremely serious like murder or treason. As opposed to mere embezzlement.

At best, the Senate could do to Duffy and Harb what it already did to Senator Brazeau when he was arrested for pushing his girlfriend down the stairs (a non-indictable offense) last winter — namely, grant him a paid leave of absence for harming the “dignity and reputation of the Senate and public trust and confidence in Parliament.”

Yeah, that’ll do it.

If he wasn’t such an obviously intelligent and educated man, you could be excused for thinking Barack Obama was a little, well, dumb.

How else to explain his fast-accumulating pile of policy failures — not bad policies, destructive policies, or ill-conceived policies, mind you, but simply failed policies, in the most literal sense of ideas attempted, but never implemented. Rarely have we seen a president as flat-out bad at getting his will done as this one. If incompetence has any useful definition, Barack Obama is it.

Last week saw Guantanamo Bay re-enter the headlines with news that more than 100 of the prison’s 166 inmates are now engaged in some manner of hunger strike, with some so weak from protest they’ve had to be painfully force-fed. Such showy acts of passive resistance were an embarrassing reminder of the fact that four years in, the President has still failed to do the thing he originally promised to do on “day one,” namely shut the place down. But at a press conference last Tuesday, Obama seemed blasé at best. I’m gonna get my people to “examine every option that we have administratively to try to deal with this issue,” he said, which I guess begs the question as to what exactly the White House had been doing previously.

Then there’s gun control, the issue which the President used the full force of his bully pulpit to promote in the wake of the Aurora and Sandy Hook massacres, passionately extolling Congress that America’s victims “deserve a vote.” Well, on April 17 the Senate gave them a vote, and despite it being on a matter of extreme moderate inoffensiveness — expanded background checks for gun show customers and internet shoppers — it still went down. Just like the plan to avoid the draconian sequestration spending cuts went down. And the jobs bill went down. And the DREAM Act went down. And perhaps the immigration bill, too. At this point for it to go in any other direction would certainly be bucking a trend.

When Barack Obama first ran for president in 2008, the critique was frequently raised that a not-even-one-term senator was perhaps not entirely qualified to run a country of 300 million. He had zero years of executive experience and less than five as a Washington resident, and measured by lack of titles alone, you’d have to go all the way back to Dwight Eisenhower to find a president with a thinner resume in the world of government (and even Ike had that whole World War II thing).

Bah, rebutted the Obamanauts, what our guy lacks in job credits he more than makes up for in vision. If anything, a lack of Washington experience will merely make his passions less diluted, his goals less compromised by years of craggy insider cynicism.

And perhaps that’s all been true. The things Obama wants, at least, from a path to citizenship for America’s 12 million illegal immigrants to same-sex marriage to cap-and-trade, are ideas undeniably aggressive in their liberalism. When the man speaks, as he did in his sharply ideological second inaugural, it’s impossible to deny the scope of his ambition.

But politics is still the art of the possible, and achieving the possible in the capital of the world’s second-largest democracy requires more than just good intentions. It requires cutthroat strategizing, sophisticated reconnaissance, and a skillful mastery of the sausage machinery of law making that can’t easily be gained from, as Hillary Clinton used to say, “on the job training.”

Thus, while Obama is quick to blame the Congress for his government’s pronounced inability to get what it wants (I resent the implication, said the President, that “my job is to somehow get them to behave”), when we look at the most successful presidents of living memory — Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, and Johnson — all were notable for their creative strategies of legislative manoeuvring. They went to the Hill and forged alliances with individual senators and representatives. They cajoled, flattered, arm-twisted, schemed and made deals. They compromised, triangulated, and gave and took.

The Obama strategy, in contrast, is to simply run ideas up the proverbial flagpole and then take great offense when no one salutes. Of the budgets the President has submitted since taking office, two out of three received ostentatious zero votes from Congress. The White House’s instance that an assault weapons ban be part of any post-Newtown gun control bill was tone-deaf in its overreach, and helped poison the well for pro-gun legislators to seriously consider the watered-down compromise that followed. Obamacare, despite baring his name, was largely crafted by Nancy Pelosi and the congressional Democrats, who indeed actively resented the White House for its lack of leadership at the time.

Obviously, Republican obstructionism in the House and Senate bears a lot of blame for Obama’s marked record of not-doing, but it would be hardly accurate to assert that the modern GOP, Tea Party-infused or not, is really so much worse than any Congressional opposition of years past. It’s easy to forget that Republican Clinton-hate was every bit as fanatical and foaming as modern Obama-hate, complete with elaborate conspiracy theories (Vince Foster was murdered!) and diabolical allegations (the President assassinates his enemies!). Lyndon Johnson passed the most radical racial equality legislation in American history at a time when Congress still possessed a sizeable caucus of open, unapologetic racists and segregationists — and that was just in his own Democratic Party. For his part, Richard Nixon’s term didn’t overlap with a single year in which either chamber of the legislature was controlled by Republicans.

In fairness, I guess it’s true that Obama does have a strategy of sorts, it’s just the wrong one. He’s had polite dinners and lunches and summits galore with Congressional Republicans, and has uttered many-a hectoring speech on the need for everyone to mind their manners and stop being so stubborn. He’s routinely appealed to optimism and emotion, and tried to embarrass and shame those who don’t appreciate the urgency of his causes. He’s even outright surrendered now and then. But the results speak for themselves.

Many years ago, I remember reading a reporter’s summary of a video montage shown at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. It featured a chronological mashup of all the Democratic presidents of the second half of the 20th Century, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt and ending with Bill Clinton. The appearances of these liberal icons generated wild cheers from the audience, noted the story, except for Jimmy Carter, who received only “polite applause.”

That, it seems, is the way American history records its presidents. There are those whose scope of deed and action guaranteed their greatness would always be uncomplicated and self-evident, and there are those who were nice and well-meaning, but ultimately too politically incompetent or strategically unskilled to leave much of a legacy. They are the men whose textbook biographies strain to describe how rejiggering this-or-that federal agency or signing some long-forgotten treaty were accomplishments deserving to share space with world wars and moon landings.

Barack Obama will be a polite applause president.

On August 20, 2012, President Obama interrupted a routine White House press briefing with a surprise cameo appearance. Well in the midst of his re-election campaign, the prez likely figured he could benefit from some direct media facetime.

“Jay tells me that you guys have been missing me,” he joked dryly.

Much of what Obama said at the presser was partisan and forgettable; a denunciation of the infamous Todd Akin comments, an umpteenth call for Mitt Romney to release his tax returns. But then, right at the end, just before he walked off the dais, the President offered a few brief comments on the civil war in Syria.

“I have, at this point, not ordered military engagement in the situation,” he said, responding to a reporter’s question, “but the point you made about chemical and biological weapons is critical. That’s an issue that doesn’t just concern Syria, it concerns our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us. We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people.”

“We have communicated in no uncertain terms to every player in the region,” he continued, “that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front, or the use of chemical weapons. That would change my calculations.”

At the time, it sounded like an empty threat. Perhaps just tough-talk posturing to improve the President’s national security bona fides with swing voters? Everyone knew even the world’s worst dictators never actually use chemical weapons any more; guys like Assad only keep the things around as an empty threat of their own, a “beware of dog” sign for a dog that doesn’t bite.

Well, never underestimate murderous psychopaths seems to be the lesson here. Last week reports began to slowly trickle in that the Syrian military had, in fact, used chemical weapons against rebel forces; specifically the nerve gas sarin in small battles near the cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Sarin causes severe muscle convulsions, loss of control over basic bodily functions, paralysis, respiratory failure, and a truly ghastly death. It’s the same chemical Saddam Hussein used to exterminate the Kurds, and the one that homicidal cult in Japan once went around pumping into subway cars.

His bluff having been called, Obama responded by equivocating. Though the use of sarin has been confirmed by the Israelis, British, and French — along with, according to Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein, the United States “intelligence community,” on April 25 the White House released an exceedingly cautious letter offering only a nervous call for “a comprehensive United Nations investigation” to corroborate these war crimes.

This whole business — a mad dictator allegedly possessing weapons of mass destruction, supposedly ambiguous foreign intelligence, UN inspections unlikely to do much beyond waste everyone’s time — obviously evoke strong memories of the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the famous “dumb war” of 2003, to quote State Senator Obama. Since liberal critics seem to have been vindicated by history in their opposition to that conflict, it’s worth recalling the underlying conclusions that motivated their opposition. If we are to avoid intervening in Syria, after all, we’ll have to make peace with similar arguments.

● Evil is not unto itself a sufficient pretext for military intervention.

● The sovereignty of independent nations is an absolute right, and no nation deserves to have theirs infringed — regardless of how odious their government may be.

● America should avoid taking sides and shedding blood (ours and theirs) in a foreign country’s domestic conflict about which we know relatively little — and have even less at stake.

● We should avoid deposing stable Middle Eastern regimes and creating chaotic post-dictator power vacuums that could emerge as breeding grounds of Islamism. Especially in conflicts where a secular dictatorship is warring with a fundamentalist-dominated opposition.

All fair concerns, and in the Syrian context, the case for non-intervention is made even starker by the the fact that no one is pushing any grandiose, George W. Bush-style schemes about turning this once-dysfunctional country into a model democracy capable of inspiring the larger neighbourhood. America’s geopolitical curiosity in the whole mess has been exceedingly limited.

Yet that limited ambition also highlights the conflict’s uncomplicated short-term urgency  for outside observers — preventing a massive loss of life at the hands of truly horrific means.

The United States could easily stop President Assad’s killings; of this there is no doubt. Syria is a third-world nation of 22 million people possessing an army of under 300,000 soldiers. There is absolutely nothing the Assad forces could do — chemical weapons or not — for which the Pentagon lacks a sophisticated and expensive method of countering.

Charity may not be a viable motive for a long-term Syrian strategy, but it seems a reasonable short-term one, as it did following the mere threat of a massacre in Libya. In that case, the Obama Administration offered the (widely disputed) figure of “100,000″ as the possible number of Libyan lives that could be saved through intervention. Well, 60,000 to 70,000 Syrians have actually died in their conflict.

To quote another bit of rhetoric the President might wish to forget at the moment — his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize speech — Obama once declared that “force can be justified on humanitarian grounds,” particularly in “places that have been scarred by war.” This, he said, was the very definition of a “just war;” one that entails the exercise of force to uphold certain universal ideals regarding the inherent dignity and sacredness of human life — values championed by every religious creed and humanist philosophy — rather than mere naked self-interest.

“We honor those ideals,” the President added later, “by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.”

And so is it now.