kabuki being played out. for the average american human being watching that on television. they don t know the difference. why do you think assad is agreeing to the community? who is he trying to win over? he is trying to win over the international community. he is speaking in english and skillful at it. greg and dennis asked some very good questions and he had clever answers. he is winning over an audience that is going to help him and it is going to be in charge of it. he is going to win advocates throughout the western world. do you think at the end of this pr and so called diplomacy
thing that counts is the end result. it doesn t matter how messy it is. and that s just not true, greg. bottom line, the american people see a government that is going from crisis to crisis, that is rudderless, where there s no leadership on the democratic or republican side, and confidence in institutions, which has already been low, is getting worse. and here s the key thing, greg, about this, what took place. the american people, as john said, the spontaneity with which they ve responded. normally, historically, when a president gives a speech or the administration says we have to take action, the country will rally around. these are the worst numbers just the opposite. the opposite. and more importantly, it s across the board. it s democrats, republicans and strictly independents. and it is the elite. it is the political class in washington saying, we want this in the mainstream of the country, from all parties and all ideologies going, no, no, no. this is historic. if it
preserver, but a lot of us think it was filled with lead. what prevented was the humiliation he was about to have in the congress on the question of whether or not he would support the war. right now we have a country where we don t believe anybody s leading anything. john? i would say we ve just been watching one of the single most inept supposed of presidential leadership in our lifetime. really? absolutely. he fumbled this thing so badly, it ends up being a handoff to vladimir putin. who now runs the world. right, he s the savior of the world who s on his way to iran to do a deal there on their nuclear program, which will not be good for the united states and the west. he took snowden in, obama insulted him. four weeks ago on this show, greg, our friend here, doug schoen said that the comment the president made about putin, he s the kid slouching in the back of the class, that would cause a backlash from putin.
angry that russia took the lead on this. this deal which the president supports, a winner or loser in your mind? i think it is a loser, because it gave russia a prosition in the middle east which they haven t had since 1970. we are now depending on the goodwill of the russian people if assad violates the agreement, and i m of the firm belief given his record, that is a very, very big gamble. the russians have now put this on the line, the syrians have put it on the line, and we have a clear objective. if they turn out the violate that, there are other ways that we can enforce it. and i nknow that and more than 100,000 people have been killed in the 2 1/2 years of war in syria. well, we can tell you that fox news has a correspondent in that country s capital tonight. greg palcott spent the day gathering first-person reaction from the people who live in damascus, and that is where the u.s. government says that the assad regime carried out the chemical attacks on the citizen
here is greg. we have been in damascus a brief time, but it is enough to get a sense of what is happening here. we are waiting for the detailed response from the government of the plan worked out between secretary of state kerry, and president lavrov, and so we went out to the streets to get an idea of what the people feel about the deal that has happened in the last couple of days. we are accompanied as we often are in damascus, a representative of the government. take a look at what we saw, and more importantly, what we heard. reporter: a busy weekend afternoon in central damascus with the u.s. military strikes lessened more people are out. war is not far away, because we can hear the artillery in the distance. are there new hopes for talks of peace? we saw that there was a pr problem and something wrong will happen in syria. i feel that we have to make peace in this area. of course, in syria. and again, the government