…you have a stronger stomach than me:

…when I see Obama on television, I’m unfailingly struck by his intelligence and charisma, by his easygoing humor, by the magnificence of his megawatt smile. He just makes me proud. Perhaps this is where I should admit that if there are two categories of Obama critics — conservatives who never liked the guy and have in some cases become unhinged since he was elected, and centrists or Democrats who voted for him but now feel let down — I have more in common with the unhinged nut jobs. My Obama admiration is a kind of emotional inverse of the right-wing Obama antipathy: I can pretend it’s all about policy, but in truth, it’s much more personal. Where his detractors dislike him because of, say, that Muslim vibe he gives off, I like him for similarly nebulous, albeit slightly more factual reasons.

I like that he’s married to—and seemingly still quite taken with—a strong, opinionated, gorgeous woman, and that he has two ridiculously cute daughters. I like his mind-bendingly multicultural extended family. I like that in a campaign interview in Glamour magazine, he could fluently and unabashedly talk about Pap smears. I thought that the beer summit of 2009 was delightful. I was even excited when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, not realizing until pundits explained otherwise that I was supposed to be aghast at its prematurity.

Jeez, get a room.

Some thoughts on the president’s petulance and its effect on Tuesday’s electorate. I disagree with this, though:

Our 44th president is a man who has an excellent brain and a not-infrequently childish disposition and who thinks he knows what is best for everyone but has neither the patience nor the humility to deal with those who preach a different way. He’s both brilliant – and exceedingly petulant.

I continue to fail to see the evidence for his “excellent brain” or his “brilliance.” I think that both are highly overrated, and always have. My esteem for his intelligence has dropped, however, along with that of the now-unentranced public. They now realize he isn’t as smart as the media insisted he was. I now think him an ideologically blinded fool.

[Update a couple minutes later]

See, here’s a perfect example: “Obama Calls For Compromise, Won’t Budge On Tax Cuts.” Democrats think that “compromise” means “going along with what the Democrats want.”

And as usual, he demagogues and lies:

“At a time when we are going to ask folks across the board to make such difficult sacrifices, I don’t see how we can afford to borrow an additional $700 billion from other countries to make all the Bush tax cuts permanent, even for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans,” the president said. “We’d be digging ourselves into an even deeper fiscal hole and passing the burden on to our children.”

No one, least of all Barack Obama, knows how much it will cost to keep those rates in place, or if it will “cost” anything at all.