I tore my hair and beat my breast when I first heard the news. The people who delivered it to me fared little better. "The damage is done," lamented Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe.
"No," I gasped as I sat upright in bed, turning the volume up on the TV that served as my alarm clock. "No, this can't be! He was doing so well."
But it's true. It's all over now, baby blue. Time's Mark Halperin went to pieces on the air, blubbering anxiously about whether Obama could just give it back. But, no, it's too late for that: Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize, dooming him to a lifetime of shame and humiliation.
Reaction from his political enemies was swift and brutal.
"This fully exposes the illusion that is Barack Obama," Rush Limbaugh told Politico.
"I did not realize [it] had an affirmative action quota," snarked RedState.com's Erick Erickson of the prize, the former recipients of which include Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.
"This really might be his Carter whacking-the-bunny-rabbit moment," Mark Krikorian gloated at The National Review.
So that's it then. This is the way the dream ends, at the hands of a secretive cabal of Nordic socialists. Obama, brought low by his own kind. (The socialist bit, not the Nordic bit.) And, of course, the Nobel Peace Prize ends the upward arc of not just the president, but all those who followed along in his wake. Rumors that the entire Democratic National Committee had slipped across the border into Canada could not be confirmed as of this writing. MSNBC has reportedly replaced Keith Olbermann by rehiring Michael Savage. What remains of the Democratic Party is busily filing court papers to have the name officially changed to the Whigs.
I called my wife, already on her way to work, and told her to file for my death certificate, and then I started packing. The plan now is to take a suitcase over to my in-laws' boat, and then try to make it to Cuba before I'm rounded up as an Enemy of All There Is. Sure, I'm nowhere near as high up the rungs of punditry as the heavy-hitters over at MSNBC, who will now be put in camps, but I was on the Obama train early, back when the 2008 presidential primaries were just starting. There will be no quarter for the likes of me.
The Nobel Peace Prize. Jesus. Why didn't they just give him cancer instead?