The death of Supreme Court Justice Scalia and what it portends for domestic politics is a monumental story. One of the wildest presidential campaigns of recent memory just got a whole lot more complicated with the politics of the nomination process.

Unfortunately, we have bigger fish to fry.

A dramatic escalation is underway in Syria that could conceivably lead to a shooting war between two nuclear powers–the US and Russia–where one miscalculation could end life on earth.

For those who haven’t been paying attention, the US has been employing Sunni-terrorists to bring about regime change in Syria. Going even further, the US was planning in the summer of 2015 to start a bombing campaign to overthrow the government of Syria in the knowledge that this would result in the victory of the Islamic State. According to a Russian diplomat, the US was openly predicting that ISIS would seize Damascus, the capital of Syria, by October.

“Last summer we were told by our Western partners that in October Damascus would fall to ISIS. What they were planning to do next we don’t know.  Probably, they would have ended up painting the extremists white and accepting them as a Sunni state straddling Iraq and Syria”.

The successful Russian intervention in Syria’s civil war changed all that. Now that the Syrian army, with Russian assistance, is winning there is utter panic in Turkey and Saudi Arabia, as well as in the neocon salons of Washington.

Faced with the failure of their five year project to carve up Syria; Turkey and Saudi Arabia have threatened to invade Syria to defend their terrorist proxies from the powerful alliance Syria has forged with Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and the Kurds. The Turkish Army is massed on the border of Syria and the Saudis are flying warplanes into Turkish airbases, to support this threatened invasion.

In an ominous echo of World War I, Russia has responded with a massive build up of military forces in southern Russia, with air force and airborne divisions placed on high alert. There are also reports that Putin warned the Turkish president in no uncertain terms.

In Risking Nuclear War for Al Qaeda? long time investigative reporter, Robert Parry, writes: “A source close to Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that the Russians have warned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Moscow is prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons if necessary to save their troops in the face of a Turkish-Saudi onslaught”.

Parry says that so far President Obama has been unwilling to flatly prohibit such an intervention, though he “has sought to calm Erdogan down and made clear that the U.S. military would not join the invasion”.

This potential for World War III shows how reckless the US’s Syrian policy has become. The US has, with its allies, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, employed Sunni-terrorists, essentially Al Qaeda, to overthrow the regime of Syrian president, Bashar al Assad. Now that these terror proxies face certain destruction, says Parry, the US allies want the US to “risk a nuclear confrontation with Russia to, in effect, protect Al Qaeda”.

The disastrous results of US regime change policies should be the story of the 2016 presidential campaign. That these policies are risking world war should serve as a bracing reminder, to all the Republican candidates and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, of the risks of their ongoing bellicosity.

The war on terror is a sick joke that’s no longer funny. In Syria the US was willing to countenance the victory of ISIS, the very definition of evil, in their quest for regime change, while pretending to fight the Islamic State.

I want to throw up.

If we had a real adversarial press rather than the lapdog variety, this scandal would be on the front page, and every single presidential candidate would be questioned endlessly about it.

But, we don’t.

So get ready for coverage of pressing issues:

1) who Trump was a dick to

2) which corporate lawyer Obama will nominate for the Supreme Court if the mean Republicans let him

3) how Bernie’s socialism will destroy America as we know it.

Update: Apparently, there still remain a few pockets of real journalism in America.

“COVERAGE OF the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press. Reporting about carnage in the ancient city of Aleppo is the latest reason why.”