Following up on comments about Secretary of State John Kerry’s “hypotheticals”:

John Stewart and I must have been on the same wavelength:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-september-10-2013/middle-eastern-promises—blue-bombs

I’m not sure I buy the bungling Mr. Magoo caricaturization of Kerry. I like my fly-fishing image. Putin has confirmed that, as both Kerry and President Obama have suggested, Obama and Putin discussed Syria’s handing over its chemical weapons to avoid attack during the G20 summit last week at St. Petersburg. Kerry’s tossing the notion out at a London news conference Tuesday morning seemed like the skillful cast of a carefully-tied attractor pattern:

“Is there anything at this point that [Assad’s] government could do or offer that would stop an attack?” Kerry was asked, apparently by a reporter.

Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done.

Sounds like a nice, concise statement of an acceptable alternative to an act of war. Almost immediately, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov rose to the bait, followed shortly later by Syria’s foreign minister and an assent from Iran. That’s some pretty fine fishing in my opinion. What the catch looks like and who lands it (to distort the metaphor somewhat) may be another matter. But do we really care if the Russians work out the details of ridding Syria of those weapons so long as it gets done? In the meantime, the president and Congress can get back to trying to run this country.

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