The old game analogy is that one guy is really good at playing checkers, but his opponent is playing chess, as in “Obama is playing checkers while Putin is playing chess.”
But that really doesn’t work in this case. Instead, here, Obama is playing tic-tac-toe, and not doing a very good job of it. Putin, pitying his opponent’s lack of skill, finds it necessary to help his opponent from making utterly stupid moves.
UNLESS Conrad Black’s hypothesis is correct, in which case, Obama is a chess grand master. I, for one, could not have imagined that a strident anticommunist like myself would ever think that a Russian tyrant deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for acting to prevent aggressive US military intervention so practically and morally deficient as that contemplated for Syria. Was Obama’s actual intention was to humiliate the US even though it makes him and Kerry look like idiots at first? If so, he’s played this quite well. Because, in a few weeks, he knows that the MSM will spin the Obama Administration Syria fiasco into his Cuban Missile Crisis wherein the Anointed One brought peace to the Middle East, eliminated Assad’s most lethal weapons, protected Israel, brought hope for democracy to Syria, etc, ad nauseum.
Putin does indeed deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for this effort.
It's painfully obvious the entire executive branch is a puppet of super wealthy Islamic extremists. It is spreading deep into the entire government and media using Mafia tactics.
The battlefield today is more about intelligence and social engineering than boots and hardware.