WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, MAKE VENOMADE. Let's see how they're reacting to Obama's speech at National Review's The Corner. First up: Greg Pollowitz.

U2's "Beautiful Day"... is playing at the Barack Obama rally. No Americans write music Obama likes?

Ooooh, the pickings are gonna be mighty slim. K-Lo:

John McCain seriously needs some of these screaming girls behind him.

Maybe A. Jerrold Perenchio can hustle some up. Class clown Jonah Goldberg says Obama wanted to say "I will appoint Hillary Clinton my Secretary of Health Human Services, no matter what opposition that invites." One is tempted to respond that Obama sounds pretty good for a guy who doesn't dare say what he feels, but let's leave Goldberg the floor.

He adds that Obama's claim that "the United States isn't afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for" is "the legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy" is "just plain stupid and dishonest." Hopes that Goldberg will explain how FDR, Truman, and JFK were afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands are cruelly disappointed.

Also: "Why not force oil companies to invest in perpetual motion machines, dogs that don't poop and free holodecks for every American." This is Goldberg's point of comparison to Obama's call for oil companies to "invest their record profits in a clean energy future" and "an energy policy that will create millions of new jobs." Considering that ExxonMobil, for one, constantly promises clean energy and more jobs, this seems unfair to the oil companies, especially coming from a spokesman for a movement that lavishly tongue-bathes them at every opportunity.

Goldberg stays on duty, but his heart isn't in it: Obama "crushed" McCain's earlier speech, he concedes, "substance aside." Lack of substance is of course Goldberg's wheelhouse, but he doesn't do much with it, muttering that "this country doesn't need 'remaking'" and wandering off to the snackbar.

Late-coming deadender Lisa Schiffren tries to hold the line, sniffing that this was "Not his finest speech" (without suggesting which speech was), merely a "painful agglomeration of liberal cliches and ringing, if tired quotes" (how does one ring a tired quote?) when Obama's "A-team speechwriters should have honed original phrases and put them in thematic order." America is of course thirsty for original phrases in thematic order, and one would expect Schiffren to haul out the Smith-Corona and get straight to work on them, but she instead sticks with her spin: "When Obama says that his party won't use religion as a wedge or patriotism as a club, that is a way of saying that those topics are out of bounds," she says. "It's always a mistake when Democrats do that." I guess she means that the wedge and the club have worked before and will work forever, which is the Republican version of keeping hope alive. Later she attacks Obama with the words of demotivational speakers Brit Hume and Billy Kristol, under the heading "Wasp Understatement." At least, and at last, someone at The Corner is hauling out the old ooga-booga.

Reinforcements are called; Amy Holmes, no doubt rubbing sleep from her eyes, grabs an early version of the talking points and lets fly: "Dems love them some Bono, even though U2's best anthems are long behind them. I went to a U2 concert years ago at the MCI Center (is it called that anymore?)..." Finally she recalls that on that event, "all of the black people at the stadium are outside scalping tickets." I'm not sure what this is meant to demonstrate, but I bet it has something to do with black people.

Poor K-Lo can't let bad enough alone:

While watching Michelle Obama's body language — fist-pounding and seemingly giving Barack last-minute prep work, then vigorously leading him offstage. Imagine the commentary if she were one Jeri Thompson.

Yeah, let's imagine ole Fred shocked awake by the pounding of his wife's fist, shaking off his confusion as she shouts instructions into his good ear, and submitting to her "vigorously leading him offstage." It's good practice for the McCain campaign.

As the chairs are upturned upon the tables and the sound system blares white noise, Mark Hemingway dazedly invokes McCain's Maverick! credentials ("In what way are Obama's policies going against the Democratic grain?"), but his colleagues have retreated to the toilets to vomit or score coke from Larry Kudlow. Meanwhile I'm watching Brian Williams on MSNBC wondering aloud how the folks at Montana's Gallatin Speedway (translation: white people) will react to Obama. Williams also talks tremulously about McCain's war record. With liberal media support like that, I don't see how Obama can lose.