SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin, the ironic international interlocutor for territorial sovereignty, condemned U.S.-led airstrikes on Syria this week, excoriating the West’s aggressive actions as lacking “authority without buy-in from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,” a point Moscow emphasized to the United Nations Secretary-General. Perhaps unbeknownst to Putin, his friend al-Assad, who has decimated thousands of his own people since the 2011 rebel uprisings in his country, is not only buying into the bombings, he’s giddily cheering on American military forces for their assistance in wiping out even larger numbers of the Syrian civilians he detests.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- On Friday afternoon, following a contentious televised altercation with a former Obama appointee, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) ridiculed as insufficient the president’s plan to continue supporting the Free Syrian Army (FSA) -- a moderate terror group that, like the United States, opposes al Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front, the regime of Syria’s Bashar Assad and ISIS. McCain accused President Obama of rejecting recommendations from national security advisers to further arm and train the FSA. “The commander-in-chief needs to start behaving like one; he needs to get his head in the game,” McCain told reporters Friday. “This is foreign policy 101. You arm one terror group to eliminate another. And when those guys turn on you, you arm a new extremist sect to put down that rebellion.” Because ISIS is now threatening Western targets, McCain is seeking support for a bold move to arm American domestic terrorists such as the Ku Klux Klan, Symbionese Liberation Army and Aryan Nations to take up the fight.