The lead story at memeorandum is Robert George’s condemnation of Obama’s insufficiently weepy statement after the Fort Hood shooting yesterday:

But instead of a somber chief executive offering reassuring words and expressions of sympathy and compassion, viewers saw a wildly disconnected and inappropriately light president making introductory remarks. At the event, a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian affairs, the president thanked various staffers and offered a “shout-out” to “Dr. Joe Medicine Crow—that Congressional Medal of Honor winner.” Three minutes in, the president spoke about the shooting, in measured and appropriate terms. Who is advising him?

Anyone at home aware of the major news story of the previous hours had to have been stunned. An incident like this requires a scrapping of the early light banter. The president should apologize for the tone of his remarks, explain what has happened, express sympathy for those slain and appeal for calm and patience until all the facts are in. That’s the least that should occur.

Here is some of his statement:

Now, I have to say, though, that beyond that, I plan to make some broader remarks about the challenges that lay ahead for Native Americans, as well as collaboration with our administration, but as some of you might have heard, there has been a tragic shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas. We don’t yet know all the details at this moment; we will share them as we get them. What we do know is that a number of American soldiers have been killed, and even more have been wounded in a horrific outburst of violence.

My immediate thoughts and prayers are with the wounded and with the families of the fallen, and with those who live and serve at Fort Hood. These are men and women who have made the selfless and courageous decision to risk and at times give their lives to protect the rest of us on a daily basis. It’s difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas. It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil.

Why, yes, that was just light banter! I’d go so far to say light-hearted and jocular, although maybe fanciful and mischievous might be how I would describe it, Robert! I haven’t laughed like that since the Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry pissed on an image of Christ.

Serenity now. Although I would like to inform the wingnuts that Bill Ayers actually wrote Obama’s remarks yesterday.

The moment I heard Snowe was going to vote for the bill, I began furiously refreshing Red State for the reaction. Finally, they deliver:

That is right, folks. To show unhappy they are, they are going to ask you to buy rock salt through their amazon store and mail it to Olympia Snowe. They don’t call them the Red State Strike Farce for nothing.

Seriously, how do I make a joke about this?

The Corner has kind of let me down today (not as nutty about the Nobel as I had hoped), but the Washington Post PostPartisan is a goldmine. This may be less funny than Ed Nick Gillespie’s star turn on Reason tv:

In a stunning announcement, Millard Fillmore Senior High School chose Shawn Rabinowitz, an incoming junior, as next year’s valedictorian. The award was made, the valedictorian committee announced from Norway of all places, on the basis of “Mr. Rabinowitz’s intention to ace every course and graduate number one in class.” In a prepared statement, young Shawn called the unprecedented award, “f—-ing awesome.”

At the same time, and amazingly enough, the Pulitzer Prize for Literature went to Sarah Palin for her stated intention “to read a book someday.” The former Alaska governor was described as “floored” by the award, announced in Stockholm by nude Swedes beating themselves with birch branches, and insisted that while she was very busy right now, someday she would make good on her vow to read a book. “You’ll see,” she said from her winter home in San Diego.

[....]

The sudden spate of awards based on intentions or plans or aspirations was attributed to the decision by the Norwegian Nobel committee to award the peace prize to Barack Obama for his efforts in nuclear disarmament and his outreach to the Muslim world. (The committee said next year it will honor a Muslim who reaches out to the non-Muslim world.) Some cynics suggested that Obama’s award was a bit premature since, among other things, a Middle East peace was as far away as ever and the world had yet to fully disarm. Nonetheless, the president seemed humbled by the news and the Norwegian committee packed for its trip to the United States, where it will appear on Dancing with the Stars.

I think it’s time for a contest: who can find the least funny attempt to satirize Obama’s Nobel Prize award?

Update. I defy anyone to top this attempted joke by Ann Althouse:

Update. So much fail from Stuffy.

You know, when I used the phrase Banana Republicans in the past, I didn’t really think it would come to this:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it.

[...]

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

I eagerly await the Fonzi of Freedom Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and the rest of the Reason crew explaining how it is the folks in the middle who are a threat to Democracy and our freedoms.

And seriously, this person was an official in two previous administrations (Johnson and Carter). At what point does this shit become unacceptable in the village?

So conservative bloggers are now publicly wondering if the murdered census worker was a child predator. Jesse Taylor summarizes the evidence:

1.) What if he was?

2.) Wouldn’t it be irresponsible not to theorize?

Amazing the depths these guys will sink to…

Like the scribblings on a bathroom wall in an insane asylum:

If only he had cut the capital gains tax instead of a stimulus bill.

Unspoofable.

Even though I find them both relatively amusing, there’s something deeply sickening about the success of Ana Marie Cox and Tucker Carlson. Neither is a reporter. Neither knows anything about policy or about how government works. Yet they’re on tv in quasi-serious settings more or less constantly.

So this kind of cracked me up:

NYC: Matt Taibbi: yay or nay?

Tucker Carlson: What a phony.

Ana Marie Cox: Not a fan but I applaud his ability to make me look like a sober and judicious practitioner of journalism.

Someone get the smelling salts for the wingnuts, because Ted Kennedy’s life’s work was mentioned at his funeral. How dare they?

If these idiots had been around then, they probably would have been outraged that the cause of civil rights was mentioned during MLK’s funeral.

Conor Friedersdorf just devoted twenty-two paragraphs to a discussion of Mark Levin’s “intellectual oeuvre”.

I can’t believe that Monica Hesse snuck this mash note past the editors (via Atrios via MM):

The gay marriage supporters have not met Brian Brown. They should. He might be more worth knowing about.

Brown is the executive director of the National Organization for Marriage, the preeminent organization dedicated to preventing the legalization of same-sex marriage. For two years, Brown has been traveling across the country. He moved his wife and six kids to California, where NOM was instrumental in passing Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment defining marriage as an institution only between a man and a woman. Before that, Connecticut, where his cause was hurt when the state Supreme Court legalized gay marriage

It was NOM that Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean went to shortly after her infamous “opposite marriage” pageant answer. “Gathering Storm,” the much-YouTubed announcement in which actors discussed how gay marriage would negatively affect their freedom of religion? That was NOM.

[....]

He has a master’s degree from Oxford, and completed course work for a doctorate in history from UCLA. He shoulders the accusations of bigotry; it’s horrible when people say that your life’s mission is actually just prejudice. He tries to help people see that opposing gay marriage does not make them bigots, that the argument should have nothing to do with hate or fear, and everything to do with history and tradition.

The reason Brian Brown is so effective is that he is pleasantly, ruthlessly sane.

I started to write the Post’s ombudsman an angry email, but at this point, I honestly feel sorry for the guy.

How did it come to this? What was the turning point?

Apparently Goldfarb has the day off, so it is Matt Continetti’s turn to attempt to rebut Klein’s latest piece that DougJ linked to:

I don’t know whether Joe Klein believes Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is a “nihilist” and a “hypocrite” engaged in a “disinformation jihad” aimed at persuading the “tight, white, extremist bubble” that is the GOP to defeat ObamaCare. Still, it might have been a good idea for Klein to have read Ryan’s health care reform plan, or the Republican Study Committee proposal, or Michele Bachmann’s Health Care Freedom of Choice Act, or the many ideas included in Yuval Levin’s latest editorial in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, before he wrote in his new column that “There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009.”

Paul Ryan was one of the very serious people who introduced a budget alternative in which they had no numbers and could not tell you how big their deficit would be. Michele Bachman has spent the last moth screaming about death panels and Ezekiel Emmanuel and the pink lizards crawling on her feet. Ok, maybe I made that up about the pink lizards. The third option- a Weekly Standard editorial that called for deregulation of the insurance industry. Because we’ve never heard that before.

Meanwhile, here is the response at Clown Hall:

I’m sorry about your Dad, Klein, but this isn’t the time to judge others for their disgust in Big Brother making decisions about life and death.

Still lying about the provision.

I’d say Klein has these guys dead to rights.

I mostly stopped reading the Daily Dish about a month ago when Conor Clarke and Conor Friedersdorf took over for a half-week or so. Suddenly, instead of short diatribes about Sarah Palin and random scatter plots from Pollster.com inexplicably titled “Reality Check”, we were subjected to multi-paragraph treatises on stuff like dating strategies and what it’s really like to live inside the beltway. Who are these dudes anyway? Neither one of them is the guy from Bright Eyes, right? And why does Conor Friedersdorf have a blog on the Daily Beast? I thought you had to be the child of someone famous, like Chris Buckley or Megan McCain, to get that gig. I guess I’d be more charitable if he weren’t writing things like this:

On arriving in Orange County, California, I expected hostility to President Obama’s health-care agenda, especially in my Republican family. But it surprised me to hear my Catholic grandmother say that if health-care reform passes bureaucrats will show up at her door advising euthanasia—and especially to hear my mother, now undergoing chemotherapy, insist that were Obamacare already law it is more likely than not that she’d now be dead.

[....]

My grandmother, my mother, and countless other Americans may be misinformed about the particulars of health-care reform, and express certain misbegotten fears, but health care proponents would do well to understand the anxiety’s source: Theirs is ultimately a fear of rapid, sweeping policy shifts, especially those brought about by lengthy, amorphous legislative proposals that leave unclear exactly what might change the month after next.

The changes for people already on Medicare will be minimal. Everyone Everyone who has kept up with the actual legislation knows that. The “death panel” bullshit comes from a (very good) provision about end-of-life counseling championed by a right-wing Republican from Georgia.

But more to the point, how can anyone possibly say that, if people don’t understand legislation perfectly, then it’s perfectly reasonable for them to assume that it will lead to Logan’s Run-style eliminationist dystopia? To me, that makes about as much sense as reading that there are strong gamma bursts 3,000 light years away and concluding that alien civilizations are likely to begin belting us with pints of ice cream traveling at the speed of light.

In other words, it’s just the kind of nonsense we’ve grown accustomed to hearing from second-tier, pseduo-intellectual internet pundits.

I guess this is the natural sequel to all the Trig truth-squadding:

But why are we supposed to rely on the testimony of Dr Fukino, whom I believe entirely. It is not my job as a journalist or yours as a citizen to take public officials on trust. They are not to be trusted, whoever they are. It is our job to demand all the evidence we want or need. I know the electronic record is legit. I have no doubt that Obama has every constitutional right to be president. I think the Birthers are nuts. But there is no reason on earth that the original cannot be retrieved and shown. Jon Klein and CNN were wrong, and I retract my apology of yesterday.

I still like Sully’s blog. But I do find it interesting that the blogger who has the most cred with the old media is one of the most batshit crazy major bloggers (I almost just said “the most”, but then I remembered Malkin and a few others).

That must be the best Human Events email subject heading ever. Here’s the full email.

Update. Per the comments, it’s worth noting that, historically, fighter jets haven’t had much success stopping the homosexual agenda.

My favorite topic for blogging—actually, my favorite topic of any kind—is all the dumb shit the media said about George W. Bush before Katrina. So I was pleased to find a link to this 2002 gem from Howard Fineman in Krugman’s post on the Obama presser:

George W. Bush likes big belt buckles: shiny silver ones. Back in Texas, he sported one from the Texas Rangers—not the baseball team he’d helped run, but the elite police of the Lone Star State. More recently, in a Vanity Fair cover portrait with his terror-fighting posse, there was Bush, suit coat open, showing off his newest silver buckle, one bearing the presidential seal.

[....]

Bush II, whose early years were spent in Midland, Texas, at Sam Houston Elementary and San Jacinto Junior High, is wired differently. He likes to call people names. That’s practically the first thing you do: Call someone out. You name something for what it is: evil. His speech of last Sept. 20, contained the toughest talk imaginable—we would do nothing less than banish terrorism from the world—and the American people loved what they heard. They still do.

[...]

Woofin’ is often the prelude to deal. There was never a deal to be cut with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. But, despite Powell’s call for a “regime change,” I can see the administration accepting the half-measure of renewed U.N. inspections in the meantime. That, at least, has been the pattern in Bush’s legislative dealings, both in Austin and in Washington.

[....]

But there was something about Putin that Bush recognized from the school playgrounds of West Texas: a guy from a proud, gigantic and rather untamed country, a guy with a touch of swagger, a gift for blunt gamesmanship and a belief in the business of doing business. Putin has warned Bush against unilateral military action in Iraq, which owes Russia $10 billion. But that leaves Bush plenty of room to maneuver.

Bush is a cowboy because he went to junior high-school in West Texas. And he’d never do something as stupid as launching an unprovoked war without international support.

Tonight, Fineman accused Obama of playing “three card monte”.

What else is there to say?

Update. More Fineman on Obama, from March:

By recent standards—and that includes Bill Clinton as well as George Bush—Obama for the most part is seeking to govern from the left, looking to solidify and rely on his own party more than woo Republicans. And yet he is by temperament judicious, even judicial. He’d have made a fine judge. But we don’t need a judge. We need a blunt-spoken coach.

Obama may be mistaking motion for progress, calling signals for a game plan. A busy, industrious overachiever, he likes to check off boxes on a long to-do list. A genial, amenable guy, he likes to appeal to every constituency, or at least not write off any. A beau ideal of Harvard Law, he can’t wait to tackle extra-credit answers on the exam.