Is "jackass" presidential?

So Kanye pulled a little something at the VMAs that I know you've all heard about.
But it turned into a media ethics question when President Obama and a pool of reporters got involved.
Here's a roundup story of what happened.
Here's the actual audio.
Here's Moran's tweet.
So what's the upshot here? Was it ethical for Moran to tweet this? Can the president ever expect to be off the record? Is "jackass" a term not in keeping with the civility required of the office? We just pummeled a congressman for saying, "You lie." What about "jackass"? Or was this an accurate and precise description worthy of circulation? Does the venue matter?
(Incidentally, this is a pretty funny parody linking the two.)

Update

Here's an update to the funeral twittering.

Twitter?

OK, Do you Twitter?
I'm intrigued by the service but not convinced. It's like having my IM status messages available to the world (but Twitter's bug that won't allow AIM update submissions right now is thoroughly ticking me off). Does this mean I have to sound more coherent?
I can see it being uber-handy if I were still a breaking news reporter, but I'm not.
How can this tool be useful to me or will it become yet one more Facebook-esque time-suck that gives me the illusion that my busy-ness is somehow worthwhile?