Assad is not good, but he's better than the other options except if the US invades Syria and Lebanon and creates a Christian majority state and an Alevi state and lets the desert between them and the Iraqi Shias and the Kurds become the IS caliphate (with a nice fence between them)
He’s only a better option if one likes Assad. If the US really has a responsibility to Syrian Christians, the proper course of action would have been to remove his sorry ass when he first started gunning people down. He left Christian villages unarmed as part of a deliberate policy, and did nothing to defend them, just rolling in with some reporters for the photo op, and peddling the nonsense that Christians were being victimized by someone other than him.