Barry Goes to Russia

Syria confirmed it would accept a Russian-brokered deal to hand over its chemical weapons Tuesday.

  NBC

Okay, that’s sloppily written. They won’t be handing over chemical weapons today, surely. It will take some time. I assume the writers (three of them) mean that on Tuesday, Syria confirmed the deal.

Now, we can continue.

That added to the international momentum behind the proposal, which has already been endorsed by Iran and China and cautiously welcomed by Britain and Germany.

Obama said Monday that the Russia plan offered a potential path that averted U.S. military strikes.

Did Obama ever offer any such proposal? Any option to avoid a strike? Especially considering that it was “common sense” that told him Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack and not concrete evidence. No? No option? Just, hang on a minute while I drum up support to bomb your asses, and maybe I’ll do it even if I don’t have support. Hey, he already got his Nobel Peace Prize. What would he want with another? They’re pretty much meaningless after his receipt of one anyway.

"We see this as potentially a positive development and we see this as a clear result of the pressure that has been put on Syria,'' [WH Spokesman Jay] Carney told MSNBC.

Right.  Assad is not really responding to an offer from Syria's strongest ally to save face for everyboy (and literal faces for many), but crumbling under the great might and wrath of the United States of America.

Senior Senators - including John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) - announced they were working on a new plan that would authorize the president to use force only if Syria did not comply with a U.N. resolution to remove chemical weapons by a pre-determined deadline.

Oh, yes. We are still very much in control.  (Wait a minute.  Didn't we go down this same path with Saddam?)

In a further development, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin said the Russian president had discussed the weapons handover plan with Obama at last week’s G-20 summit.

Barry, I will fix this for you. You will owe me, da?

"We held a very fruitful round of talks with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday, and he proposed an initiative relating to chemical weapons. And in the evening we agreed to the Russian initiative," Walid al-Moualem was quoted as telling the speaker of Russia's lower house parliament house in Moscow.

He said Syria had agreed because this would "remove the grounds for American aggression," the Interfax report said.

[...]

While Obama called Syria's response "a potentially positive development," he said on NBC News that it would need to be taken "with a grain of salt." "We are going to run this to ground," Obama said. "[Secretary of State] John Kerry will be talking to his Russian counterpart. We're going to make sure that we see how serious these proposals are."

  alJazeera

There’s your only ground.

Oh yes, we are very much in control. Make no mistake about it.