"He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing."  If Goethe was right, I guess we can give up on President Obama exerting a useful influence.  By now he's insulted just about everything and everyone.  I list some of his insults below, in alphabetical order by insultee.  Let the healing begin.

"... senior members of Obama's national security team say Karzai has not done enough to address the grave challenges facing his nation. They deem him to be a mercurial and vacillating chieftain... Obama intends to maintain an arm's-length relationship with Karzai... The administration will also seek to bypass Karzai... The administration rebuffed Karzai's request for a bilateral visit to Washington this spring... Karzai's meeting with Obama today is scheduled for 20 minutes..."

"I've been practicing bowling.  I bowled a 129.  It was like the Special Olympics or something."

"Right now, doctors, a lot of times, are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that's out there. So if ... your child has a bad sore throat, or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid's tonsils out.'"

"All I'm saying is let's take the example of something like diabetes... if a family care physician works with his or her patient to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they're taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance. But if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that's $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 -- immediately the surgeon is reimbursed. Well, why not make sure that we're also reimbursing the care that prevents the amputation, right? That will save us money. (Applause.)" 

"It's like a little yappy dog?... It, like, sits in your lap and things?... It sounds kinda like a girly dog... We're going to have a big rambunctious dog, of some sort."

"... she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, well there's a reaction that's in our experiences that won't go away and can sometimes come out in the wrong way. And that's just the nature of race in our society."

"One thing I'm proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues."

"YES WE CAN!"

"... you've got kids or you've got grandkids -- they need to make sure that they've got the same security that Medicare provides seniors"

"... at the pace we're on right now, Medicare is going to run out of money in eight years" 

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest... And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

"So although the Philippines is not the largest of countries, it, in using a phrase from boxing, punches above its weight in the international arena, and we are very grateful that President Arroyo has visited us here today..."

"...the Cambridge police acted stupidly... there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact."

"I mean, if you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? No, they are. It's the post office that's always having problems."

"I didn't want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any séances."

"Along the way, you gave us a pretty good deal on Alaska. Thank you."

"I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don't think that he, I don't think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretation of a lot of the Constitution."

"for so many veterans the war rages on -- the flashbacks that won't go away, the loved ones who now seem like strangers, the heavy darkness of depression that has led to too many of our troops taking their own lives."