Blog Buzz: Bush, Barack-as-Neville, GOP nominee Nostradamus and More

W speech: Barack O-Chamberlain?

TNR's Christopher Orr says Bush's overseas apparent swipe at Barack Obama-as-Neville Chamberlain is both off-base and politically inept, though Mike Long at the conservative Political Mavens sees some irony in Democrats complaining about politics going beyond the water's edge. Matthew Yglesias says that Bush and his allies make the mistake of seeing Hitler in any foreigner they don't like. Power Line's Paul says that Obama—not named in the speech—is being defensive, while NRO's Jim Geraghty says that it's true that the Illinois senator has never advocated negotiating with terrorists—just their sponsors.

McC-stradamus

John McCain has seen the future, and he is president. (When Buzz sees the future it involves winning lottery numbers. To each their own.) His looking-backward speech has the war in Iraq simmered down by 2013, a prediction in which Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum sees a timeline, but Matthew Yglesias thinks it just means that McCain's Iraq solution involves hoping really hard (is that the audacity of hope?). Both the liberal Carpetbagger and the conservative Jim Geraghty think the speech is insufficient on the details of how his McCain-topia will come to pass.

MSM on GOP SOS

The mainstream media has settled on a GOP-in-turmoil story line, and TPM's Josh Marshall wonders why anyone is surprised that the congressional Republicans are floundering. MyDD's Jonathan Singer thinks the Dems should go Truman on McCain and tie the do-nothing GOP members of Congress around his neck. RedState's Dan McLaughlin wonders whether moderate Tom Davis understands what ails the Grand Old Party, while the Weekly Standard's Gary Andres notes that the volume of suggestions for salvaging the Republican brand doesn't make the execution any easier.

Edwards endorsement good for a few laughs

So what do John Edwards's delegates do? MyDD's Todd Beaton has a rundown. Ed Kilgore at Dem Strategist gives Team Ed-bama a hat-tip for skillfully eclipsing the Clinton-West Virginia momentum but wonders whether Edwards even matters at this point. Perhaps not, given the blog humor the endorsement generated, as HuffPo's Andy Borowitz (positively Onion-like) had Hillary vowing to keep fighting for Edwards's endorsement, while TPM's Josh Marshall noted that Hillary remains in the primary while Barack has dropped out to join the general.

—Robert Schlesinger