“Look, I’m not just talking about Snowden and Syria,” Mr. Obama said. “What about Pussy Riot? What about your anti-gay laws? Total jackass moves, my friend.”

G20 Ends Abruptly as Obama Calls Putin a Jackass : The New Yorker

That there above: satire gone viral!

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Who else in St Petersburg publicly declared, as he did, that Syria’s “so-called chemical weapons attack” was in fact “a provocation staged by rebels, in hope of winning extra backing from their foreign backers”?

In making that categorical claim, the Russian leader left little room for compromise and ended up looking, perhaps, somewhat isolated.

BBC News – Syria crisis: No clear winner in Russia-US G20 duel

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For real, Bridget Kendall writing for the BBC reports that eleven countries endorsed a statement agreeing that evidence associated with Syria’s most recent chemical weapons attack “pointed to Syrian government culpability.”

As suggested here, also recently, the world is witness to a war about integrity and power.

Indeed, it is one thing for Putin to go about the business of restoring Russian grandeur and might and adjusting his state in a Russian way to the new day — and let Russians respond to that as they may: it is another thing to abet the state-driven barbarism on display daily in both Iran and Syria and to become identified with it.

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