Obama hits Syria with brutal blast of adverbs

The U.S. has also used other tools to press its case. For instance, it has supported sanctions that prevent Assad’s wife, Asma al-Assad, from shopping in Europe. And it has supported a UN plan to station dozens of unarmed observers in Syria to watch Assad’s forces kill civilians and then write reports about it.

Still more action may be needed. At the risk of deepening U.S. involvement in this very complicated conflict, my suggestion is that Obama and his team conduct a “surge” of new adjectives and adverbs in their campaign, including such words as “callous,” “merciless,” “pitiless” — and even, perhaps, “barbarous.”

The optimist in me believes that the White House wouldn’t have to maintain this surge for too long. Why? Because several months after saying that the patience of the international community had “evaporated,” Rice wrote on Twitter that our patience had been “exhausted.” Now that patience has been both evaporated and exhausted, even Assad must understand that his time is nearly up.

Of course, Rice reported that patience had been exhausted on April 24. My suspicion is that, in three or four more weeks, we will learn that U.S. patience is “completely exhausted.”