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Rachel Maddow called on Tuesday for Congress to debate and vote on a potential American attack on Syria before President Obama takes any action.
It seems all but certain that some form of military action will take place, but Maddow urged caution.
"If you take one click to a wider view, that reveals more of a debate and less of a certainty that this attack is going to happen, or at least that it should happen," she said.
She read from an interview with former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix which appeared on The Huffington Post. Blix, who oversaw the UN's aborted inspection of Iraq's (ultimately non-existent) weapons program in 2003, said he saw echoes of those days now.
Maddow then went through all of the complicated questions surrounding a potential attack, and proposed one solution to the problem: congressional debate.
"Fortunately, there's an app for that," she said, referring to the nominal need for Congress to declare war before any shots can be fired. Legislators, she said, should debate whether or not there should be an attack on Syria, and vote.
Maddow also went after the Syrian Electronic Army for its hacking of the New York Times website.
The Times became the latest news organization to get hacked by the SEA on Tuesday when the site was down for many hours throughout the afternoon and evening. The pro-President Bashar Assad group also claimed responsibility for hacking into The Huffington Post's UK site and changing Twitter's online information to show that the site was now owned by the SEA. Maddow called the attack "so sophomoric that it's an insult to sophomores to call it that."
Maddow added that the SEA has been very successful at carrying out "these mostly dumb but occasionally crippling attacks on the highest profile websites on the earth."
The MSNBC host then wondered, "Is this a freelancing effort by Assad's supporters? Or is this Syrian policy? Is this cyber warfare being waged by Syria's military at the direction of Syria's president? Is this one of the things that Syria feels it can do to lash out at the rest of the world as this country gets increasingly isolated and condemned among the nations of the world?"
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