By Friday morning the geniuses around him had clearly convinced him how bad he looked on Thursday, when he had told us “it looks like it may be a terrible tragedy.” Wow. No wonder we constantly hear about how much smarter he is than everybody else in the room.

President Obama is right to say that we shouldn’t get out ahead of the facts here. But he has so much evidence already, starting with tracking pictures of that missile. He has had this evidence since the weekend, when he should have immediately convened a summit of the leaders of this country, and England, and France and Germany, and even the Netherlands. This is evidence — count on this — that will eventually be presented to the world at the United Nations by Samantha Power, our Ambassador to the UN, and soon.

And then, if the evidence is as good as we have been told, the President and his chief European allies must deliver the message that they are quite willing to bring down the Russian economy — and the billionaires it has produced, if necessary — if that’s what it takes to remove Russia’s president from power.

Always our President was good with speeches, and language. Last Thursday he couldn’t even manage that.