I had really hoped that the press and cable news learned their lesson on being complicit in promoting a dangerous political agenda after the lead-up to the Iraq war, but then Donald Trump came along, and rather than being appropriately critical, they lay back until it was too late, and now he's president. Then I hoped that maybe the media learned their lesson from their mishandling of Trump's campaign, and then last night happened.

If Trump Really Cared About the Syrian People, He’d Open the Border to Refugees Put up or shut up.

Donald Trump ordered a military attack on Syria in a stark and sudden departure from his previous position of non-intervention. And rather than offering a skeptical and critical approach to this news, many in the media world fell over themselves to blindly accept and praise his actions.

Take, for example, repeat plagiarist Fareed Zakaria.

This idea that the way to be "presidential" or "strong" is to bomb another country is so incredibly dangerous. It sends the message that diplomacy is tantamount to weakness and creates a system of incentives that only encourages more violence. This isn't to say that military action is never required, or even that it wasn't required in this case, but we can't act like every time someone drops some bombs on a place they're suddenly JFK leaning on the Resolute Desk.

Take the venerable New York Times, which should know this better than anyone after their botched handling of the Clinton email story and their role in selling the Iraq war. Today the paper of record posted a story with this headline:

Screen shot/ New York Times

They've since changed it to "Acting on Instinct, Trump Upends His Own Foreign Policy," but the fact that the Times would write a fluff piece that totally buys into a narrative that Trump is magnanimously coming to the rescue of Syrian civilians being brutalized, while mostly ignoring the fact that he has demonized those same civilians when they wanted to escape that terrible situation, is extremely dangerous territory. Again, I'm not saying that everything Donald Trump is going to do should automatically be dismissed, but I am saying that we owe the American people a critical press. Blindly falling into the same traps we've fallen into over and over again is not how you create a safe, stable world. It's a recipe for disaster.

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