President Barack Obama has become a comic figure on the world stage, a laughingstock unable to keep his story straight, while his principal rival seizes the initiative in Syria.  So desperate is Obama for a face-saving retreat from his ultimatum on Syrian chemical weapons that he will concede the really important issues to Russia, Syria and Iran. And being Obama, he will portray his retreat as a great diplomatic victory, and his media claque will sell the story to the low information voting public. Vladimir Putin saw his opening when SecState Kerry casually offered a response to a reporter's question that the United States would call off its threat to attack Syria if that country turned over its chemical weapons. The actual professional diplomats at the State Department, horrified, claimed that this policy shift was a "rhetorical, hypothetical" offer, but it was too late. Putin's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Russia would push its Syrian ally to turn over all its...(Read Full Post)