Who cares? Suppositions on either side are really boorish (to quote pundit Peggy Noonan.) I am absolutely split on 'whether or not he deserved it.' This matter's a lot like burlesque.

But to object to it, as the right wing have determined - notably, David Brooks, who says he 'should give it back,' or Limbaugh, who is now 'allied with the Taliban' - is freakish.

And to unflinchingly adhere to the idea that he absolutely deserves it is mawkish. I am not so sure...yet. (But, I do like the fact that he is giving away his monetary award of $1.4 million to charity. I'd love to have heard THAT conversation with the First Lady.) Even Maddow did a great job of quietly straddling the ambivalence of historic expectations in what will be an interesting game of watching Peacemaker Obama.

So far I'm sixty-to-forty for it. I'm dying to see new treaties and nuclear accords and how the hell he is going to tell the neocons that their disproportional misadventure in Afghanistan is over. Perhaps that's why blathering idiot Dick Cheney has shut the f**k up. That's worth a few laughs. What a waste of life he is.

The Republican Party is utterly corrupt. These Glenn Beck and AM radio themes will kill their electoral chances in 2010.

Bankrupt of any populist ideas that might actually help the citizenry, and unable to generate any more fear, they would use hate to persecute the smallest minorities, ginning up support from only their most radical base.

pathetic.

...loathsome logic...and it's time for a guillotine to be erected on the people's mall in D.C.

When Andrew Bacevich can shave neocon warmongers down to size with a 100-word razor of low-budget, state-managed intelligent community policing writ large, there's a point at which Cheney and his ilk should be absolutely muzzled with shame. That's not Obama's style...but he's doing it with a thousand cuts.

Perhaps it's the influence of the Nobel Prize and his rational temperament....we'll see.

two bodies of thought in constant collision. Thank God for atheists and agnostics. They make the rejection of evangelistic religious trespass into world politics look moderate and appealing.

Then comes Douthat.