I’m going to put the Assad meme on a material analysis, because I do think it has predictive power.
There are only two types of people in the West that know about Assad. Those two are (a) Leftists, and (b) So if you are bringing up Assad in a general conversation, those are by and large the only people who would care. That begs the question whenever Assad is brought up by a politician: “Who is your audience?” For politicians the audience is overwhelmingly for Government and their corporations. That means politicians are ignoring domestic issues like (for example…) 40MM Americans are in poverty or school shootings or that all basic goods shot up 20%+ in price in a few years. Those are hardly the only issues, but you must put all of them on the backburner to care about some leader in the Middle-East. Thus the meme, and the attention on Assad in general, is an excellent display of disconnect from actual living breathing people. As such, Assad-obsessed politicians generally lose to other politicians that focus more on their electorate.
tl;dr:
It’s like The League of Shadows from Batman is working to sabotage everyone who says it.
