In typical fashion Donald Trump is responding to a story which casts his actions following the Khan Sheikhoun attack in a bad light by doubling down and making wild threats that he is about to do the same thing all over again.
Meanwhile the Russians are furious, President Assad is visiting Russia's Khmeimim air base in a public Russian show of support for him, and the rest of the US government - apart from Nikki Haley, who longs for more pictures of her "standing up to the Russians" - are baffled.
What all this means is that almost certainly no US attack on Syrian forces is being planned. The media is mistaking a blundering attempt at news management for a real threat.
Unfortunately that does not mean that a US attack on Syria will not take place. The risk with making wild threats of the kind the White House has just made is that there are any number of dangerous people in Syria who will seize on them and try to make them a reality. The risk of another staged 'chemical attack' intended to put pressure Trump to act on his 'warning' is now very real.
It is to be hoped that cooler heads within the US government - Mattis, Tillerson and McMaster first and foremost - will be warning the President of this, and telling him to cool down.
"It's mostly bullsh*t right now. Like, we don't have any big giant proof," Bonifield tells a reporter in secretly-filmed footage released by conservative activist James O'Keefe via Project Veritas.O'Keefe formed Veritas in 2010 claiming its mission is to "investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct." It has since been sued for its information-gathering methods, primarily targeting liberal organizations, and presenting its findings in a misleading, highly edited format.
"Health care is a very, very tough thing to get," Mr. Trump said in an interview shown Sunday on Fox News. "But I think we're going to get it. We don't have too much of a choice because the alternative is the dead carcass of Obamacare."With Democrats solidly opposed to the legislation, Senate Republicans must find the votes from within. They can afford to lose only two votes, but five Republican senators have announced that they cannot support the health care bill as drafted, and others have expressed concerns.
Now the pendulum has swung a bit back towards frost, but I am convinced that it will inevitably find the right balance and we will be joining efforts to face today's challenges, Putin told reporters.This is commentary not meant to be pedantic nitpicking, but there are important reasons to point out why the pendulum analogy is mistaken. That model for relations is based on the false assumption that the dynamic can go from bad to good, and vice versa.
Comment: Finesse or results...Trump has to acquire both. Not only has he rocked the home boat, he's sent tsunamis abroad, perhaps necessarily. That the statistics reflect this are not that unimaginable.