Have you read any good books lately? <a href="http://blog.woolfwithme.com/#compelled" rel="nofollow">preteen lolita dark portal</a>  Unraveling the history is like trying to untie a series of thin shoelace knots tightened by different hands. Unravel one and there's another and another. Obama's pinprick warning was made necessary by the knot-tightener in chief, Secretary of State John Kerry. He told a London press conference on Sept. 9 that a punitive strike on Syria for the "obscenity" (his word from an earlier statement) of gassing 1,400 of its own people &ndash; including hundreds of children who died foaming at the mouth &ndash; would be "unbelievably small." This sounded like a parody of President Theodore Roosevelt's adoption of the African proverb, talk softly but carry a big stick. What this administration has done is the reverse: Talk loudly, but carry a small stick. And when challenged, drop the small stick in favor of small talk. And that's how we now end up with another president in the catbird seat, namely Russia's. Vladimir Putin seized on Kerry's off-the-cuff hypothetical remark that Syrian President Bashar Assad could avoid a missile strike by the U.S. if he turned over his complete arsenal of chemical weapons within the week.