The Obamessiah's Classy Crack On Special Olympians

Hoo, boy:

Now if that's not classy, I don't know what is!

Of course, he did apologize, but Mary Katharine Ham brings us so much more than just the apology:

This morning, Obama had to apologize to the head of the Special Olympics for his flop of a foray into stand-up, Bernard-Manning-style.

He expressed his disappointment and he apologized, in a way that was very moving,” Shriver said on ABC's “Good Morning America.” “It’s important to see that words hurt, and words do matter. And these words that in some respect can be seen as humiliating or a put-down of people with special needs do cause pain, and they do result in stereotypes."

Obama told Shriver he wants to have some Special Olympics competitors over to the White House for basketball or bowling.

It's times like this that I'm reminded of what a wise pundit once told us makes Obama more than just a singularly impressive intellectual— his "social perception."

And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he's a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, 'David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you're only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.' And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.

It is this extraordinary capacity that led him, no doubt, to make a joke at the expense of disabled children on national television. It must have been his social perception that led him to call the people of D.C. weather wimps as soon as he got here, or make a rude joke about a sweet, elderly First Lady of the United States at his first press conference, or insensitively parrot a headline about Jessica Simpson's weight on national television, or begin his bipartisan, "new politics" outreach with, "I won."

On a related note, check out Obama's latest approval numbers:

Huh. Go figure.

There's my two cents.