FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

At first I thought, "O God no Joanna Newsom is trying to sneak back get the spray-bottle" but this song is kind of sticking with me.
•   Jonah Goldberg's column today could have been titled, "I'm not lazy and stupid, you're lazy and stupid!" He says Obama is dumb because he won't admit Islam itself is responsible for the nuts who kill in its name. The President's anodyne ecumenical statement is, in Goldberg's view, the same thing as saying "Michael Jordan didn’t play basketball" or  "We didn’t win World War II" in that, durr, that's stoopid too, right? The analogy invites deeper analysis, so step well back as Goldberg executes his logic-fart:

“No religion is responsible for terrorism,” the president proclaimed, “people are responsible for violence and terrorism.”

Now obviously, there’s some truth to this. We judge people more by their actions than by their beliefs. But reasonable people also recognize that our actions often have a causal relationship with our beliefs. This is hardly a controversial — or even debatable — insight. Orthodox Jews don’t avoid bacon because it tastes bad; they do so because they’re keeping kosher. One cannot intelligently discuss why Mother Teresa helped the poor without referring to her faith. And one cannot discuss why the Islamic State burns, rapes, and enslaves people without taking their religious beliefs into account.

See -- Jews have wacky eating habits, Christians are nice, and Muslims are savage rapist-murders; Q.E.Doritos Cool Ranch! While I attribute the lack of retribution I've suffered for my anti-Mohammed cartoons to global respect for my artistry, I think Goldberg is safe because most non-conservatives can't make out what he's trying to say.

•   Speaking of legacy pledges and the next GOP President, Bill Kristol worries that Hillary Clinton is getting better numbers in the reps-the-future-not-the-past category in a CNN/ORC poll than any Republican Presidential candidate. (Scott Walker's numbers are least bad, perhaps because voters relate his social-net-shredding record to the dystopian future of The Handmaid's Tale or Idiocracy.) Kristol thinks he sees a way out:

Perhaps some new set of concerns in 2016 will overwhelm all the past/future talk. Given the state of the world, that’s quite possible. We could easily have a foreign policy election in 2016. And then people might not mind a steady hand, even if one from the past (think Richard Nixon in 1968).

One thing Americans  seem to have learned from the last clusterfuck in which Bill Kristol had a hand is, let's not do that again. In fact Kristol himself was complaining about "American war-weariness" only last year. Yet now he thinks beating the drum for Gulf War III might get one of his ringers elected. I suppose that's because he has more than average faith in the power of yellow journalism and jingo. After all, he is the editor of the Weekly Standard, which is very influential among people who never read anything they can't get for free on the New York-DC shuttle; that's got to count for something.

•   Whether or not I get to see any of the other big films (see my "On to Oscar" posts), at some point this weekend I'm going to stick my fool neck out, as I have in years past, and predict Sunday's winners. So watch this space! (And the easy way to do this is to get on my Twitter feed, where I announce posts sometime and dish out apothegms.)

•   Yeah it's late and who cares, but there are a few wonderful things about this Noah Rothman Hot Air column defending noted asshole Rudolph Giuliani and the asshole thing he said this week. I mean, it's mostly terrible on the level of Twitchy (look at the sickburn takedown of the media by "Florida-based political operative Rick Wilson"!), but in his flailing Rothman does bang into an interesting defense:

What are we to make of this frenzied attack on Giuliani, in which the whole of the political press reacted as though a man who left office 14 years ago had insulted their mothers?... 

Oh, but he was a leading presidential candidate in 2007, don’t you know? And he delivered the keynote address at the GOP’s nominating convention in 2008. And he’s a frequent guest on cable news, so he must be influential (a claim that could only be made by someone who rarely appears on cable news). But observing Giuliani’s diminished stature today when compared to the last decade renders the media’s reaction even less explicable.

I hope someone in Rudy's retinue told him, "It's okay, chief -- Noah Rothman says it doesn't matter 'cause you're a has-been!" Oh but the very, very, very best is the correction at the end:

An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the chairman of the RNC as Ron Fournier

May your weekend be as serendipitous.

AXELROD, YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD.

This is masterful trolling:

Barack Obama was "bullshitting" his opposition to gay marriage and support for civil unions during his 2008 presidential campaign, according to a new book authored by former senior White House adviser David Axelrod. 

Time magazine reported Tuesday that the longtime Obama confidant said in his new book, "Believer: My Forty Years in Politics," that he counseled then-senator Obama to soften his position on gay marriage for political reasons. 

"Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a ‘sacred union,’” Axelrod wrote, as quoted by Time...

"I’m just not very good at bullshitting," Obama told Axelrod after one of those events, as quoted by Time.

Normal people will go, "Yeah, so?" Even Lincoln was doing the "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it" thing as late as 1862. Getting elected President in a nation always verging on a majority makeup of Snopeses requires some finesse.

But among the abnormal, by which I mean conservatives, it's a different story. So roll out the argh-blargh and mutter-sputter! Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart.com:

OBAMA’S GAY MARRIAGE LIE WAS A LIE ABOUT HIS FAITH, TOO... 

"Obama Misled Nation” is almost a perennial headline–it applies to nearly everything the president does. Yet it is important to be clear about the nature of this particular lie. 

Obama did not just pretend to oppose a controversial position. He pretended to hold that view as a matter of his Christian faith. 

Thus he made Christians look bigoted -- by acting the bigot and thus getting them to vote for him! HE IS THE FATHER OF LIES! Next, Noah Rothman at Hot Air:

Obama... spent the next 16 years hiding his politically inconvenient opinions from the public until they became acceptable to a majority. There’s nothing especially shocking about that, but the fact that this fails to astonish is itself a lamentable condition. 

[Blink. Blink.]

...This level of cynicism, the expectation that obviously our political leaders would mislead us about what they truly believe, cannot be healthy in the long run. 

Yeah, the first two hundred years of knowing that politicians lie were alright, but now it's getting a little old. I know, let's elect that Duck Dynasty guy.

Most of the brethren apply their traditional Crisis of Credibility bullshit -- "It’s liars all the way down in this administration," hehindeeds Ole Perfesser Instapundit; "Obama lied about opposing gay marriage, contrived the 'God’s in the mix' stuff, isn’t an Honest Politician," huffs Guv'nah Charles C.W. Cooke; "Obama Adviser Says Obama Repeatedly Lied About Gay Marriage for Political Gain... Related: They Lied: Obamacare’s 12 false premises and broken promises," report those lovable libertarians at Reason (read the comments for extra libertarianism, by which I mean loss of faith in humanity).

But we see their point -- the political repercussions could be severe: Maybe word will spread to Alabama, and the Democrats will have a hard time winning elections there!

UPDATE. Oh man:

That monster! Or maybe the Daily Caller doofus who wrote this thinks Sasha and Malia are the monsters, for helping Nobama pretend he used to be regular Christian fag-hater in order to hornswoggle the American People into gayness. Just look at them in the picture, acting like a regular family!

Next we have neo-neocon. The entire tortured mess is hilarious -- sort of Murder in the Cathedral meets Blood Feud -- but there are two stop-the-show moments:

Over the years Americans have become cynical about lying presidents. Some date that cynicism—or at least a great leap forward for that cynicism—to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and the fact that Clinton survived it. The left, of course, says “Bush lied” about WMDs, but the right points out that Bush relied on intelligence reports around the world that were mistaken, and that is different than a lie, and that a lie would have been wrong.

So what if he turned a formerly functional Middle East republic into a slaughterhouse and killed thousands of innocent people? He may be a war criminal, but he's not a liar!

[NOTE: I haven't seen any reactions from the black religious community yet, but it's possible they might be quite displeased at this news. It's one thing to change your mind on something; it's another to lie to religious people about your religious beliefs.]

"Why is that white lady staring at us from the bushes? It's like she wants ask us something but she's scared."