Immediately after the president's speech last night someone posted this tweet" It was a 16 minutes speech that will turn into three days of scrutiny." They were right because shortly after Joe Scarborough read a litany of negative articles criticizing Obama's speech,Cokie Roberts, said that his tele- prompter was too high because he need to face the American people eye- to- eye. She also said the speech should have been given at the White House residency to give it a homely look. It wasn't until 2 hours later that Lawrence O'Donnell injected some truth into the conversation. He said that not one of those astute writers offered a solution.
The people at Fox were praising Putin for pulling a fast one on our president. I thought they were going to run Putin as their candidate for president. They they changed their tune because someone must have whispered in their ear that a peaceful settlement might help the president. They then starting saying that the president is foolish for trusting Assad and Putin.
Joe Scarborough thinks President Obama stumbled into this recent development where Russia and Syria agreed that the latter must give up their chemical weapons. No Joe,while you and Andrea Mitchell were criticizing Obama for going to the G20 in Russia instead of staying home to find and twist the arms of the scared Congressmen hiding underneath their desks, Obama had a late night dinner with Putin which might have sealed the deal.
There is constant chatter about us having a weak president and country without acknowledging that it was Assad who went to CBS pleading for a no strike. It is Putin who now is willing to be a broker in getting Syria to give up their chemical weapons;which they say they never had.
I believe were it not for a threat of military action,Putin would have never come to the table. Damascus,Stria is a very important seaport for Russia, The threat of terrorism scares the Russians and the possibility of those chemical weapons falling into the hands of terrorist in the southern most region of their country gives them an incentive to find,secure and eventually destroy the weapons.
Andrea Mitchell quickly pointed to a pentagon report from the 90s that said it would take
75,000 UN troops to find and secure all the chemical weapons. Our friend Israel knows where 80% of those weapons are because they have been tracking them. Andrea said it would be impossible to transport the weapons in an ongoing civil war. I think a cease-fire resolution might work because nobody but al -Qaeda wants to use these weapons.
Lawrence O'Donnell continues to be a nemesis for a shoot-from-the hip,Joe Scarborough.
Joe said if the president was soundly defeated in Congress he would been an ineffective,weak president on domestic and foreign affairs. Lawrence reminded Joe that George H. W. Bush had approval ratings in the high 80s after liberating Kuwait but he didn't have a clue about the economy and lost to Bill Clinton a few months later.
Then there is the spokesman for the new isolationist wing of the GOP,Rand Paul. who has a lot of hypotheticals but no real answers other than Obama is wrong. He insists that the president is helping al-Qaeda gain Syria but somehow killing Assad would be OK..Want to or not,leaving Assad in power is the best solution for now (the devil we know) in keeping that area stable. Yes,Assad has the military might to keep the New Syrian Army out of power for a long time. One of these days ,we are going to have realize that democracy is not for everyone.
The speech was on target with what the president has been saying all along. He's not calling for regime change because that might not be in our best interest. The message we send to North Korea and Iran that we will not tolerate chemical warfare has to mean something. Yes,the speech can be sliced and diced to mean something else for the naysayers but that's to be expected.