Mr Obama views suggestions for more robust action as a prescription for disaster. His advisers are exploring whether anything can be done to protect Syrian opposition allies targeted by Russian forces, but they are unwilling to provide defensive arms to use against Russian warplanes.
This year it’s Syria instead of Ukraine but the rest of the sentence could have (and probably did) appeared verbatim in the same periodical a year ago.
I’m trying not to laugh because bombings are not funny but the situation is too reminiscent of the old joke where a masochist says, “Hit me, hit me!” and a sadist responds, “No, I wont, no, I won’t.”
Russia and the US are totally locked in an S&M dynamic here. Please see the preceding post for a prognosis how this relationship will develop.
Clarissa's Blog 
Well, there was some international good news today:
Angela Merkel, John Kerry, Pope Francis, and Edward Snowden were all passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Hey, so who won?
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A Tunisian group called “the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet,” because of its “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in [Tunisia] in the wake of the [Arab Spring] of 2011.” The group includes a labor union, a trade confederation, a human rights organization and a lawyers group.
Obviously, this group isn’t world-famous, but maybe they actually deserved the prize — something that none of the well-known major contenders did.
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I’m happy about this. It would have been deeply bizarre if the prize had gone to Snowden. Alongside the Nobel to Alexievich, it would have looked crazy.
Yay to Tunisians!
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On the surface that award would for once appear to make sense.
I don’t know what Barack Obama did to win it and am skeptical about the European Union.
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This year all Nobels, as far as I can judge, have been surprisingly reasonable.
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Did you know that all of the Nobel Prizes except the Peace Prize are awarded by Swedish committees, and that the Peace Prize committee is always composed of Norwegians? For some reason unknown to history, this arrangement was specified in Alfred Nobel’s will.
He created the Nobel Prizes because of guilt over his most famous invention, dynamite.
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Norway was sort of part of Sweden at the time (I forget the exact configuration but it was a similar to Danish rule which lasted a lot longer). The Swedes didn’t try to impose their language (as the Danes had) but left more overall negative impression.
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Obama did absolutely nothing. The committee admitted that it gave him the award as an intended political slap at George W. Bush, and also because the committee was stupid enough to believe that receiving the award would somehow influence Obama’s future behavior.
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Hey, it looks like they weren’t wrong. He now can’t send even defensive weaponry anywhere.
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So basically it awarded him it for not being Dubya. Right.
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After the horror of Dubya, most people in the world would award anybody who wasn’t him.
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@cliff arroyo
I didn’t know that. Well, you’re never too old to learn. Thanks!
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Actually, Bush Jr. was only the THIRD worst President in my lifetime, and Jimmy Carter is very upset that Obama’s pushed him (Carter) out of first place!
Nixon? He wasn’t so bad (except for losing in Vietnam), and at least Clinton was a good Republican after he took a thrashing in his first mid-term elections.
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Except for that little Unpleasantness called Watergate that forced him to resign from office, and, of course, his well-known anti-Semitism, which even Henry Kissinger had to admit was there.
I know conservatives have low standards today, Dreidel, but could you find another conservative who wasn’t a crook in office like Nixon to admire?
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During Nixon’s first term, he was a better President than Hubert Humphrey would’ve been, and during his second — well, the country suffered far less going through Watergate than if the maniacal McGovern had been elected.
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Which Nixon insured wouldn’t happen when his men sabotaged Ed Muskie’s campaign.
But your excuse of criminal activity has been noted.
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Muskie sabotaged his own campaign when he cried in the snow.
Who’s excusing Nixon’s criminal behavior? He paid for it with his resignation — but he was still a better President than Humphrey or McGovern would have been.
If you think half the politicians in Washington aren’t crooks in one way or another, you’re quite naive.
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I stupidly thought that sending non-lethal weaponry to Ukraine signalled USA moving to the stage of readiness to send non-lethal weaponry to other parts of the world too, even if it would spoil Putin’s plans. If you aren’t afraid of Putin in Ukraine, while not be not afraid to the same degree in Syria?
Are those defensive arms lethal weaponry? If yes, can’t USA send at least some non-lethal weaponry to Syria?
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@el
Obama is afraid to confront Putin all over the world. What you are witnessing is the twilight of honor in the United States, a great power cowering before a tiny bully. Some disheartened writers will tell you that this is not Obama’s fault, that he is tied down by the isolationism of the American voter.
In truth, the American people have always been hesitant to commit treasure and blood to approaching wars, and have needed leadership from their commander-in-chief to point out what would eventually be required.
Many Northerners favored a negotiated peace with the separationist South during the American Civil War. Most Americans opposed U.S. entry into WWI, even after the Germans torpedoed the British passenger ship Lusitania in 1915. Roosevelt took years to convince the U.S. that Hitler was a threat to America, slowly using his leadership and gradually guiding U.S. opinion, taking steps such as reinstating a peace-time draft, and even then it took the attack on Pearl Harbor to convince the country to fight.
Obama is doing nothing to prepare America for the coming storm, or even attempting small steps that still have the potential to head it off. He’s hoping that the maelstrom, if it comes, can be delayed until the next President’s watch in 2016.
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Because the war in Ukraine is over and the war in Syria is just beginning. Obama doesn’t want these weapons actually to be used against Russians.
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