Well, at least the president is a Nobel Prize winner and not a cowboy.

Brits mock another Obama gaffe.

Obama is back to impressing the Brits.

Obama misremembers name of British Chancellor.

Which lets me paste this again.

Tolerate stupid, get more stupid.

James Geraghty notes the equivocation of the term "gaffe" in modern politics:

In that light, how should we assess President Obama's "the private sector is doing fine," "if you have a business, you didn't build that" and "our plan worked"? The argument from the president's defenders is that each one is literally true and only sounds odd to those who don't understand the context -- that the private sector is creating jobs while state and local governments cut back, the "that" refers to roads and bridges, not the business itself, and the plan refers to Bill Clinton's tax hikes, not Obama's enacted policies. The problem is that all of these explanations aren't as exculpatory as his fans think:

A) If 80,000 or so jobs per month -- not enough to keep up with workforce additions -- is your idea of "doing fine," you're setting the bar too low.

B) Even if President Obama was talking about "roads and bridges," business owners did indeed pay for that, through income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and business taxes.

C) Even if Obama meant Clinton's tax hikes when he said our plan "worked," he's crediting the Clinton tax hikes as the cause of the 1990s economic boom -- not the rise of the Internet in American life, the dot-com bubble, etc. "Our plan worked" contends we're just one big tax hike away from restoring 4 percent annual GDP growth. Except that the tax hikes were enacted in 1993, and the boom didn't start until 1996--1997.

The argument from Obama's critics would be that the "gaffes" aren't misstatements but signals of what Obama really thinks -- that the private sector's current growth rate really is "fine," that he thinks businessmen smugly give themselves too much credit for their success and not enough credit to government, and that tax hikes are good for the economy. Perhaps Republicans read too much into these remarks . . . but perhaps not.

Anyway, carping that the press makes a big deal out of Republican gaffes and ignores Democrat ones is an old, well-founded, and tired complaint. But what's striking is that the result of this culture within the press corps is that at least three of the highest figures in the Democratic party today are among those most prone to making statements that range from the bizarre to the outrageous to the unhinged . . . and they pay no discernible price for these habits. No matter what they say, the labels "dumb" or "foolish" never seem to stick to them.

As I said with respect to Nancy Pelosi's amazing caricature of Jews as chiefly motivated by their concerned about "ducats":

There might be something to Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. When you think of the insensitive things said by ranking Democrats such as Pelosi, Biden and Reid, you can't help but conclude that the whole party would be helped by culling out the dumbest ones.

Is it the pitter-patter of a preference cascade?

The insiders at the Washington Post discovery that America's Greatest Communicator Ever is lousy at press conferences:

If you are president of the United States and you don’t have anything to say, don’t have a press conference to say it. If you’re the president of the United States and by Thursday it’s widely believed you’ve had one of the worst weeks of your presidency, take Friday off, and specifically avoid having a press conference.

Anytime you are president and you’re speaking in public at an ill-timed press conference after a bad week, try to have something to say, and do a good job in saying it. I watched the whole thing, but it’s not easy to think of one useful thing that he had to say. And what he said, he said very poorly. Was it just me, or did the president seem a little dazed and confused? He should have had a cup of coffee before the press conference.

And one more thing that’s a pet peeve. The president says “uhhh” too much. When I was a cable television news extra during the ‘90s and early 2000s, you learn early to purge your presentation of “uhhh.” Saying “uhhh” suggests uncertainty and is distracting. (And in my case, when it was accompanied by a Southern accent, it was even worse.) I don’t know what the president had in mind, but his own meandering, stuttering performance could not have done him any good with any audience. What was he, uhhh, thinking?

Perhaps the president and others are huddled in an after-action review meeting in the Oval Office right now. It appears no one at The White House wants to give the president bad news or an honest critique of his performance. Somebody should print this post and slide it under the Oval Office door immediately.

First, there's a reason that Obama has given fewer press conferences than past presidents, i.e,, Obama didn't give a press conference between 2009 and 2012. Why would we think he has any particular facility with that form of communication?

Second, telempropter dependence.

Hey, that emperor is naked.