Here's the clip of Niall Ferguson talking Egypt on Morning Joe and the Jokettes:

A few thoughts:

1. It reminds me of Chris Christie's "You should really see me when I'm pissed" adlib in that Obaman pieties get their teeth kicked in with such aplomb that there's nothing left but to urinate on the body and leave quietly.

2. By the end the MSNBC folk look like sad puppies who've had their ball taken away. Their hackneyed gotchas like "What about Bush?" were picked up by Ferguson and used as training aids to display Obama's cluelessness.

3. Mika Brzezinski defines 'dumb blonde'. That's not news, but it's no comfort that America is now the 'Mika' of world affairs.

Mick intones:

I'm glad you posted this, because I wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

The irony here is that it takes a hyper-credentialed individual like Ferguson to be in a position to state something millions of people think is bloody obvious.

I commented on an article earlier today that reported that Obama was seething over the state departments 'missteps' over Egypt. My observation was that so many contradictory statements by prominent members of the administration can only mean one thing--there is no clearly delineated foreign policy. One simply can't imagine this happening in the Bush administration or even in the Clinton administration for that matter. It is completely unprecedented.

Ferguson's observations about history are also elementary--revolutions are messy affairs that rarely decline to spill over the edge of the bowl. Just today, Italian authorities are reporting no less than five thousand Tunisians have landed in Italy in make-shift craft. They are easily on track to see a hundred thousand or more seeking refuge status. Tunisia has been roiled by wave after wave of resignations for the provisional government and the ripples from the initial impact of the revolution don't appear to have a prospect of diminishing any time soon.

I'm heartened to see the kind of embarrassment evident on MSNBC. No journalist can survive looking stupid, and it's likely that this incident will knock down the apologetics reflex another notch or two among the merely liberal left. At this point, only total idiocy on the part of Republicans can rescue a second term for the most incompetent President since Franklin Pierce.