For your edification, a look back at the phrases, nouns, and neologisms that have, for better or for worse, shaped the week’s national discourse.

Photo by Pete Souza.Last night President Obama celebrated his 50th birthday with what sounds like a nice party at the White House. If you’re a card-carrying member of the Tea Party, a Fox News anchor, or a House Republican, you’ll need a statement of outrage handy for all blog comments, television appearances, and press releases. It’s easy with VF Daily’s Official Pre-fab Paranoid Indignation Statement-Maker™!

Choose one (1) option from each category, and enter your selections into the sentence below.

1. Local Communist in attendance

Al Sharpton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel

2. Liberal Hollywood celebrity

Jay-Z, Chris Rock, Tom Hanks, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock

3. Unhealthy food

Hamburgers, ribs, chocolate cake, pie (cherry, huckleberry, apple, or peach)

After knuckling under to House Republican demands in the debt-ceiling debate, Barack Obama climaxed one of the roughest stretches of his presidency by turning 50 yesterday. (Ouch.) He marked this milestone with family and friends at a low-key White House birthday dinner. After the jump is the menu, at least as Representative Emanuel Cleaver II (D-MO), coiner of the phrase “sugar-coated Satan sandwich,” might have imagined it. One hopes the meal didn’t leave too bitter an aftertaste . . .

Photo illustration by Alexandra Beggs.

Snowboard photo by JIRO115/Flickr.No. We didn’t think so. Just don’t read any other articles, such as this one, with the word “Dow” in the title.

Today the E! channel announced that Kim Kardashian’s wedding to Kim Kardashian’s Fiancé will be broadcast for four hours over a span of two nights. The programming has left some wondering how the event can possibly fill that amount of time. Anyone wondering about that has very obviously never heard Kim Kardashian talk. Here’s a plausible scenario of what a four-hour Kardashian wedding might look like.

Newt Gingrich’s recent whining about his Twitter popularity respective to other 2012 candidates may have had a point, buried beneath the tiresome sense of entitlement and misunderstanding of the 24-hour news cycle. It’s time for the media to pay closer attention to the online presence of Republicans running for president. Herewith, an analysis of each G.O.P. contender’s Twitter. Coming soon: Facebook pages!

A deleted tweet, lost to the ages.By now surely you’ve heard of a scandal that has enveloped Twitter.com/NewtGingrich: Gawker, going on a tip from an anonymous source, reported that the novelty presidential candidate “hired a firm to boost his follower count, in part by creating fake accounts en masse.” Our generation’s Watergate investigation was prompted by Gingrich’s whining a few days earlier that he had more Twitter followers, but less of a command of the news cycle, than, say, someone much more relevant to the current decade like Michele Bachmann.

Illustration by Barry Blitt.

According to Rose, Ehsan Bayat, an Afghan-American telecommunications entrepreneur, who was also a counterterrorism source working for the F.B.I., had built close relationships with senior Taliban officials, including foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil. Bayat was in the habit of giving his Taliban friends satellite phones as gifts—phones that Rose believes may even have been used by Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Through his connections, and with the aide of British partners, Bayat brokered a deal to set up a company called Afghan Wireless. The Afghan Ministry of Communications would hold 20 percent of the company and Bayat would retain the majority share. According to details of the deal outlined in Vanity Fair, “not only would the new phone company be the sole cell and landline provider in Afghanistan, it would also control the “gateways” out of the country—all voice and data traffic, including that carried by satellite phones and the Internet.”

Photo by Pete Souza.Like many of you at home, 2012 Republican presidential candidates hated the debt-ceiling compromise—but how advantageously did they hate it? Below, our textual analysis of statements by four hopefuls and Sarah Palin.

Mitt Romney

“President Obama’s leadership failure has pushed the economy to the brink at the eleventh hour and 59th minute. While I appreciate the extraordinarily difficult situation President Obama’s lack of leadership has placed Republican members of Congress in, I personally cannot support this deal. As president, my plan would have produced a budget that was cut, capped and balanced—not one that opens the door to higher taxes and puts defense cuts on the table.”

Objections raised: President Obama’s fecklessness; the demise of the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act.

Clichés: “To the brink,” “eleventh hour and 59th minute,” “opens the door” “puts … on the table.”

G.O.P. Speech-o-Matic Buzzwords: “Cup, capped, and balanced,” “higher taxes,” “defense cuts.”

Points won: The Sarah Palin Award and Scholarship for Mixed Metaphors

Tomorrow is the president’s birthday! Photo by Pete Souza.Barack Obama slammed down his game of Angry Birds. He was angry, too, and he had far more powerful weaponry at his disposal than unhatched aerodynamic eggs. It was almost midnight, and he was half a minute away from being half a century old.

Bill Daley opened the door to the Oval.

“Everything O.K.?” he asked. “I heard a noise that sounded like you slamming your iPad on the desk after losing a game of Angry Birds.”

“I didn’t lose,” Obama said, haughtily. “It’s paused.”

“I think Harry Reid wanted to meet—” Daley began.

Obama sighed. He felt as if everyone was holding him back—as if every time happiness, or a helmet-wearing pig, came within reach, something happened to make it go away again. He was sick of everything: tired of the whining, sick of the press corps, annoyed with stupid Billy Daley who was all, “Meeting meeting boring boring do this do that.”

“I’m going for a walk,” Obama said and swiveled away from his desk, tucking his iPad in his messenger bag, which he had affixed with an Allman Brothers sticker earlier that evening.