As Pure An Example Of Shark-Jumping As One Could Ever Hope For

Yes, I realize there is a dangling preposition in the title of this post. But there are more important things afoot. Like the fact that the president just won a Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not sure whether that means that he has jumped the shark or that the Nobel committee has jumped the shark, but I'm pretty sure I just saw a shadow flit across a dorsal fin, and so we can deduce that someone or something has, indeed, vaulted over it.

In a world where reasonable political discourse is the norm, this would be c-c-c-craaaazy stuff, but we don't live in such a world. We live in a world where Sarah Palin is considered to be a viable candidate for public office, and where people straight-facedly call the Fox channel "news," and where people who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that the Congress' current healthcare reform bill contains "death panels" are considered serious analysts whose opinions on the subject of the day, which is often somehow Britney Spears-related (gah!), are to be carefully weighed before coming to any important conclusions about the state of the union.

So, in light of these things and others, I am going to attempt to help you help me get a grasp on the relative weirdness of this morning's central revelation through an intellectual exercise based around the following question:

{ahem}

Is the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama more or less shocking and embarrassing than the fact that his predecessor authorized and carried out a program of torturing civilians in secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe?

An Inconvenient Truth

Republicans, please. If you're going to insist on referring to Obama as "emperor," you might want to make mention of the fact that the most imperial thing about his potential presidency is the scope of executive power that Bush and Cheney are feverishly amassing for him.

It might not win you points with the dead-enders, but it will go a little ways toward making you sound less ridiculous. Assuming you're into that.

(I'll take my thanks in the form of all-caps blog comments.)

The Post Gins Up Some Rummy

Your friend and mine Donald Rumsfeld apparently used to fire off about 40-60 little memos a day, termed "snowflakes" for the way they drifted down upon the heads and outstretched tongues of the Department of Defense. After reading several of them, it would appear that the good Secretary was awfully concerned with how things were being perceived in the press, and felt he was often being depicted unfairly. He would, at times, attempt (with some success) to develop counter-narratives to combat the depictions at which he took umbrage.

Does that sound like a Secretary of Defense? Or does that sound like the type of thing that one would expect from, for instance, a blogger?