Ugh.

The Minority Whip Cantor has been trying to beat up on the President, knee-jerk bloggers are invoking ridiculous arguments, John McCain chucked history into a time machine, all of it because they think standing tall in front of the klieg lights and issuing some sweeping Hollywood-style statement in support of the brave protesters would just be an awesome thing to do. Fuck the consequences, just say a whole bunch of shit about freedom, man.

Disappointed with the President’s savvy determination to avoid handing the hard-liners a p.r. victory, they flocked to a right-wing post Sunday in which David Patterico ‘contrasted’ (*cough*) what the protesters were suffering and what Obama was doing (getting ice cream with the kids) by way of cherry-picking a list of Twitter messages.

And to point out how informative of reality it is to lift ‘tweets’ from the victims of hideous violence and place them next to those of the presidentially star-struck, here is a re-enactment of that web offering:

–New Shiite for Iran:

Ouch I have been shot. Pray for me.
31 minutes ago from web

–Obama guy:

Look! He so loves SPRINKLES!
24 minutes ago from web

–New Shiite for Iran:

My own blood.
17 minutes ago from web

–Obama guy:

He titters and guffaws! Velvet butterflies lick my ears!
A few minutes ago you bastards

–New Shiite for Iran:

grrghulldawl…blarghh….mother….
Time sad

Obama guy:

I have blown in my pants! And I favor it!
Computer weep

People took this professionally overwrought choice of contrasts seriously. Actual comments on Patterico’s ridiculous thread:

-–Of course, he’d go out for ice cream; the White House is boring, there’s nothing to eat there, and besides, nothing’s happening anywhere important anyway.

Comment by Patterico — 6/20/2009 @ 5:43 pm

As usual with them, the appearance of things is far more important than the reality. Which is what you would expect from people who deified Reagan, the permanent haze Actor/President with the sadly diseased brain.

As the President of a nation once arrogant and bullying enough to replace Iran’s leader with one we preferred, Obama is just smart to measure his words. And because he’s not going to start screaming at the violent assholes because it’d easily backfire, it really doesn’t matter what else he does, right-wingers will be disappointed with him, and posts like this will continue to show up. He could have been eating dinner, or going to the kids’ recitals or soccer games, whatever, they’ll be bending over backwards to point out he’s an amateur, he’s not a leader, blah blah.

Which, since we’re speaking of straining, leads us to the Powerline post. If you’re wondering just what it is the Conservatives feel is missing, it’s something like this. What kind of comments they’d dearly love to hear now, well, try this on:

Let it be said

We make a few simple points about the events transpiring over the past week in Iran. The Iranian regime is an evil tyranny. It supports terrorists and terrorism. The United States has a debt of honor to settle with it for the kidnapping and mistreatment of American hostages thirty years ago. That disgrace is not simply a matter of history. It is a disgrace in which Iran’s execrable president personally participated. We remember.

Referring to Churchill and Hitler, Leo Strauss observed that the contrast between the indomitable and magnanimous statesman and the insane tyrant presented a “spectacle [that] in its clear simplicity was one of the greatest lessons which men can learn, at any time.” So today we find that the contrast between the brave people of Iran standing up for their freedom from the tyranny of the Iranian regime is too “in its clear simplicity…one of the greatest lessons which men can learn, at any time.”

‘Let it be said, an evil tyranny, debt of honor, a matter of history…’, they love this chintz language. And then, of course, comes Hitler, and then the exact same quote in two successive sentences–they really think this is hard iron. It never occurs to them that once it’s soaked with Scott Johnson’s tears, it’s nothing but oatmeal. And that’s what’s awesome.