Rightbloggers Agree With, Denounce Obama Nobel Speech

Ha! Just kidding. They mostly hated it, or more specifically him.

The prize for faint-praising goes to neo-neocon who, after informing us that Obama is neither Lincoln nor Churchill, concedes it was "the most robust defense of American military action I've ever heard him give." Nonetheless, she goes to motive: "Perhaps Obama offers these words at this time because he feels the need to defend himself... The problem is that they are just words, and this is just a speech -- and Obama has given many other speeches, and spent much of the first year of his presidency, contradicting them." So you can't trust anything he says anyway; but it would have been okay if someone else was giving it.

Victor Davis Hanson of National Review attacked the speech for "verbosity," "extraneousness," using the words "I" and "me" 34 times, "the messianic cult of personality, "the 50/50, split-the-difference trope," "the straw man," "reference to his own unique personal story," the Pony, the Mashed Potato, and the Alligator. Also, "Iraq as the bad war is a subtext of the entire speech." Even what Obama doesn't say, but implies, is bad. Hanson is probably scouring the published text of the speech now for nefarious acrostics.

Ross Douthat couldn't find much to say against a speech with which he largely agreed, so he went with the "air of the ridiculous" that "still hung about the ceremony, with its jazz interludes, defensive introductory remarks, and cutaways to Will Smith in the audience." So, "as effective as the speech was in certain ways, it still should never have been given." He should have started with that, and saved us all some time.

Ann Althouse finds a constituency Obama neglected: "Although Obama acknowledges the immense evil spurred by ideas about God, he presents God as the source of our ability to find our shared humanity and to abandon unjust wars. Atheists can stew off in a corner somewhere, apparently." Won't somebody teach this man how to pander?

The President did have some takers on the other side -- Newt Gingrich, for example. But we all know what a traitor he is. To sum up: Even when they agree with him, rightbloggers find Obama detestable. Some peacemaker!