If you were wondering what Barack Obama meant when he said “everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up,” he was calling them a bunch of bedwetters.

“It’s a phrase I use,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said today, hesitating at his press briefing to offer a physical demonstration of the phraseology.

“Let’s do this in a way that’s family friendly,” Gibbs said. “I think ‘wee-weed up’ is when people get all nervous for no particular reason….

”August of 2008, everybody was nervous about whether the entire presidential campaign was slipping out from the hands of the president,“ Gibbs said, turning the page to this August, in which all the president’s critics are declaring his health-care initiatives in peril. ”This is sort of an August pundit pattern of people getting overly nervous about something that has a long way to go…

“Bedwetting would probably be the more consumer-friendly term for it,” the press secretary said.