It’s bad enough Representative Dennis Kucinich ran off to visit Syria’s mass-murdering tyrant Bashar al-Assad while pools of blood are still warm on the streets. Now stories are appearing in Syria’s state-run media portraying our silliest Congressman as a mouthpiece for the dictatorship.
“There are some who want to give a wrong picture about what is going on in Syria,” he said, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency, which is, I have to point out, beyond unreliable and unprofessional. “President al-Assad is highly loved and appreciated by the Syrians,” he also supposedly said, though I doubt very much he actually did. SANA also claims he said, “President Bashar al-Assad cares so much about what is taking place in Syria, which is evident in his effort towards a new Syria and everybody who meets him can be certain of this.”
I’d say he sounds like a hostage, but there’s little chance those words are actually his. Syrian “journalism” is hardly more reality-based than North Korea’s official state broadcasts, so let’s just assume for now the only part of the story that’s true is the part where Kucinich took a plane to Damascus. That doesn’t mean he’s off the hook. Any foreign policy adviser familiar with the region could have warned him he’d be used by the regime, and Assad’s media minions are shameless professional fantasists.
I’m sure he means well and wishes we could all just get along, but he won’t make the Middle East a better place with this kind of stunt. Millions of Syrian citizens are well aware an elected U.S. official just met with their butcher, and now they’re being told Assad has a supportive friend in our Congress. That Kucinich likely blundered into his role as a mass-murderer’s prop rather than consciously choosing it does not change the fact that is what he has become.
The Syrian regime has been wooing useful Western idiots to its capital for decades. That Assad can still pull this off even while the Obama administration talks about filing war crimes charges shows there’s a virtually limitless supply of unteachable people at the highest levels of our government who simply have no idea what a monster looks like when they see one.