Poker, Porn, and "Gambling John" McCain

They go together, don't they?

The British IT Goofball's Daily, our monicker for the website The Register,  published the good news that the porn blocker software in the UK parliament works as expected and blocked some 309,316 attempts in 12 months to access smut from within the halls of British democracy. Defenders were quick to point out that spam played a big role, ah well, believe it or not.

And then there was Mr. Weiner providing unlimited jokes to The Daily Show in a normally slow news summer. If there were a political category "most widely known political hard-on", Mr. W., aka Carlos Danger, would be the uncontested winner.

And now, there is John McCain, aka. "Gambling John" McCain (we made that up), caught playing poker on his iPhone during the Syria hearing.

While Twitterati thumbed their noses at Gambling John, they missed two truly important parts of the story.

The first one: Gambling John McCain knows at least the basics of iPhone operation.

This should be headline news all by itself.

The second, more important point is the poker game. The US media took the poker game to be a game of man versus machine, Gambling John versus the Apple software genies.

They were soooo wrong!

Gambling John was at that very moment engaged in a massively two-player game with non other than Syrian President Assad.

Gambling John had challenged Assad with the opener: "I win, we bomb you - you win, we bomb you anyway."

"But you did nothing when Saddam Hussein gassed the Iranians and then the Kurds!"

"You want to be invaded if I win?"

No, it's okay, let's play."