But forget the man’s ego (and the world’s inverted moral compass) for a minute, and think about the man’s balls. That’s right, his balls. In his acceptance speech this morning, he said the award represents all of those working for peace and opportunity, and specifically mentioned activists working for democracy even though it puts them at risk. Pretty amazing to praise the same folks whom you’ve just abandoned in Iran by refusing modest funding to the organization that documents their persecution.

Here’s an idea for you, Mr. President. Take your prize money and give it to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center.  That should provide about half the funding you just refused them.

UPDATE: Nick Gillespie at Reason suggests Obama should decline the award “on principle” and one of his commenters takes it one step further: “If he accepts it, he is every bit the megelomaniac [sic] his worst critics say he is.”

UPDATE #2: Finally found a transcript of Obama’s acceptance speech. Here’s the passage I’m referring to (emphasis mine):

And that’s why this award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity; for the young woman who marches silently in the streets on behalf of her right to be heard, even in the face of beatings and bullets; for the leader imprisoned in her own home because she refuses to abandon her commitment to democracy; for the soldier who sacrificed through tour after tour of duty on behalf of someone half a world away; and for all those men and women across the world who sacrifice their safety and their freedom and sometime their lives for the cause of peace.

If you really care about those folks, Mr. President, send these folks the prize money.

UPDATE #3: Michelle Malkin is soliciting suggestions for what Obama should do with the $1.4 million prize.

Here’s one overview, which I really agree with, especially the last sentence:

I think Obama is going to turn out to be the worst president since Carter, and for the same reason: good intentions do not guarantee good results. Idealists often stub their toes on the wayward rocks of reality, and fall on their faces. And the world doesn’t respond to benign behavior benignly.

But I couldn’t disagree more with this:

Obama and Congressional Democrats will do things that cause harm, but very little of it will be irreversible.

That might be true for simple statutory changes, like union card check, but I think it is a crazy thought when it comes to the creation of new bureaucracies. Can you think of any significant ones we’ve gotten rid of?

Here’s one of the “good” things den Beste sees from the election and the course of the campaign, and another thing I disagree with:

It is no longer possible for anyone to deny that the MSM is heavily biased. The MSM have been biased for decades but managed an illusion of fairness. That is no longer possible; the MSM have squandered their credibility during this campaign. They’ll never get that credibility back again.

Oh, how I wish he were right, but I doubt it. Everyone saying this already knew the media was biased, and I don’t think the media’s pathetic performance in vetting Obama changed the minds of many people about the media except at the margins. The media will continue to deny, deny, deny, and doesn’t appear to be the least bit embarrassed by its performance. The ranks of those who think the media is left wing might have grown slightly, but not enough. A large portion of the electorate will remain sheep.

And here are three of den Beste’s most frightening predictions for an Obama presidency:

2. The US hasn’t suffered a terrorist attack by al Qaeda since 9/11, but we’ll get at least one during Obama’s term.

3. We’re going to lose in Afghanistan.

4. Iran will get nuclear weapons. There will be nuclear war between Iran and Israel. (This is the only irreversibly terrible thing I see upcoming, and it’s very bad indeed.)

On those, I sure hope he’s wrong.

Sarah Palin’s credibility on foreign policy is going to take some time to gel, but the instantaneous criticism that she had no foreign policy experience was a little ridiculous. I mean, if everyone feels that strongly that a candidate has to have foreign policy experience, that pretty much limits your field doesn’t it? You’d never have had an FDR or Reagan, and the left’s criticism of Palin’s foreign policy credentials also would have disqualified Bill Clinton. They were all governors. (Ace has a good post on the “foreign policy experience” of governors generally.)

Some conservatives are getting awfully nervous about Sarah Palin. Some of the criticism is reasonable, some is not.

I think Rich Lowry of The Corner has taken a reasonable approach. I think he was right in his assessment of Palin’s performance regardng the “Bush Doctrine” question from Charlie Gibson: that “the truly pro-Palin position is to think she can, should, and will do better than this.” I also agreed with him when, in a follow-up, he wrote:

The debate about how many versions of the Bush doctrine there are is serving as fog to distract attention from the fact that, on any reasonable reading, Palin didn’t know. I don’t see why we all have to be so resistant to admitting this. Let me try to demonstrate: She is totally new to these issues and has a lot of learning to do. There. Is that so hard?

Kathleen Parker calls on Palin to quit (but she bases her view of Palin’s inadequacy on her supposed inability to handle the present financial crisis, rather than foreign policy). Kat-Mo at Ace of Spades HQ does a pretty good take down of Parker’s piece. Read it all, but this should give you the gist:

Parker gets a load of the Big Financial problem in our face and decides that Palin is incapable of handling the crisis and she should leave the national politics of crashing markets to the idiot national politicians that got us here in the first place.

Brilliant idea.