No wingnut grievance is too small or ridiculous for the Obama White House

Shoot me in the face:

The Department of Education has now changed their supplementary materials on President Obama's upcoming address to schoolchildren on the importance of education -- eliminating a phrase that some conservatives, such as the Florida GOP, happened to have been bashing as evidence of socialist indoctrination in our schools.

No longer pro-America?

I remember when it used to bother the wingnuts when Middle Eastern countries would defy the wishes of the U.S. president:

Blowing off a U.S. President is not an easy thing for an Israeli government to do. The Netanyahu government deserves credit for doing just that, so far.

Hard to satirize, those Powerline guys

Roy Edroso's roundup of wingnut responses to the Somali pirate story, yesterday:

...And [Red State blogger] Huston yelled that "the French... THE FRENCH... use proper military force against these criminal pirates" -- referring to a rescue mission that ended with the death of a hostage.

But getting the hostage killed has got to be the right way to run a rescue, because Obama didn't do it.

Ha ha, right? No, this actually does seem to be the wingnut house view. Powerline last night:

This weekend, while the focus was on the hostage situation involving Captain Phillips, the French military rescued four French hostages, including a three-year-old boy, after President Sarkozy authorized a military attack on a French yacht that pirates had seized in the Gulf of Aden a week earlier. The rescued hostages were all unharmed [Yay!], but another hostage, the skipper of the yacht, was killed... [But you just said... Oh, I see. He doesn't count as a "rescued" hostage.]

Although the French government did negotiate for a while with the priates on the captured yacht last week, President Sarkozy's overall approach to these incidents seems more aggressive and proactive than President Obama's.

After downplaying "hostage survival rate" as an overrated metric in evaluating hostage situation responses (certainly when compared to "perceived machismo quotient"), Mirengoff imagines that the Navy commanders must have been construing Obama's instructions to take out the pirates more broadly than he intended.

Just when you think it can't get any more embarrassing, Hindrocket shows up in an addendum and together they riff on how the French aren't wimps at all but are in fact "cynical cowboys." The French aren't wimps now? I'm almost sorry to see them like this.

The Pittsburgh shooting

Yesterday I approvingly quoted Charles Blow's op-ed about how the wingnuts are really starting to come loose, but I'm still a little uncomfortable with the use of the 23 year-old skinhead cop killer in Pittsburgh as evidence of that trend.

My objection is not that it's necessarily unseemly to "play politics" with tragedy, and pretty much all shootings seem like good arguments for gun control to me. But the pool of people who actually go on shooting rampages is thankfully too small and too fucked up to extrapolate much from their politics. It may be a cliche ("crazies on both sides"), but it seems that taking it seriously means really not caring which websites a person was posting on before they started shooting at the cops.

The argument about which political ideology is intrinsically brutal and crazy is easily winnable without deploying actual murdering psychopaths as data points.

My kind of opening graf

Charles Blow:

Lately I’ve been consuming as much conservative media as possible (interspersed with shots of Pepto-Bismol) to get a better sense of the mind and mood of the right. My read: They’re apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their “leaders” seem to be trying to mold them into militias.