Character Assassination Is Forever

By Mitch Berg

A year ago, Obama was being hailed as a “light worker”, the salvor of our nation’s soul; a man, but not just a man.

Today, of course, his poll numbers are gratifyingly human:

The nation is close to evenly split in its assessment of the president’s policies to date, and there is great intensity on both sides of the debate with dwindling numbers in the middle.Those are the chief findings of the latest NPR poll of 850 registered voters conducted nationwide Wednesday through Sunday by a bipartisan team. The pollsters found 53 percent approving of the president’s handling of his job, while 42 percent disapproved — the narrowest gap of the Obama presidency to date. Most of the approving group said they approved strongly, and an even greater majority of the disapproving group said they disapproved strongly.

Poll respondents liked a Democratic statement on solving health care problems better than a Republican statement (51 percent to 42 percent). However, when asked about the plan now moving through Congress, a plurality of 47 percent was opposed and 42 percent said they were in favor, based on what they had heard about the plan so far.

Presidential poll numbers are the most fungible transient asset in American politics, of course; Ronald Reagan’s numbers were abysmal in 1982, but jumped enough to give him re-election in 1984 and a Republican house of Congress in 1986.  So don’t start writing Obama’s political epitaph yet.

Because poll numbers aren’t forever.

I’m not so much saying this to the Republican and Conservative readers, though.  It’s not them I’m worried about.

No, it’s the readers on the left that concerned me.  Because while poll numbers change with the breeze, hatred just smolders on; Eric Kleefeld is finding racists under rocks.

He addresses the “racism” between the lines (it must be between the lines) from, in this case, Rush Limbaugh (with commentary inset):

So let’s take a look at some of those recent racially-charged attacks that have circulated against Obama, both right before and after the Gates incident.

Above all others, the real celebrity here has been Rush Limbaugh. He’s done this kind of thing before — remember the “Barack, The Magic Negro” song? [which, while un-PC, was a takeoff on a line by a liberal commentator; certainly not a commentary on Limbaugh’s approach to race – Ed.] But in the wake of the Gates incident, he’s managed to become even more hard-edged about it. “Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman,” Limbaugh declared this past Friday. [which would have been pretty below-the-belt, had it not been for the fact that that’s exactly how Gates played it – as a racial issue- Ed.] Yesterday, he shared a dream he’s had about the dangers to capitalism: “I had a dream that I was a slave building a sphinx in a desert that looked like Obama.” [Remember when dissent was the highest virtue?  Now, it’s apparently “racist”- Ed.] And he joked that food-safety advocates will go after all the unhealthy foods people like to eat, one by one — but they’ll have to wait until Obama is out of office to ban Oreos. [I suppose it would have been safer to say “Starbucks” or “Volvo” or “Patagonia”…- Ed.]

How much intellectual seed corn is the left willing to burn to prop up The One?  Poll numbers come and go,  but assaults on the integrity of half of ones’ fellow countrymen – defamatory, specious, intellectually vacuous attacks, of course – are gifts that just keep on giving.

9 Responses to “Character Assassination Is Forever”

  1. joelr Says:

    This, word, “fungible,” I don’t think it means what you think it means.

  2. Terry Says:

    If we are still looking at 9.5% unemployment & a stalled Dow this time next year Obama’s poll numbers will be worse than Bush’s.

  3. kel Says:

    yeah frangible would make more sense.

  4. Terry Says:

    Howzabout ‘fun gerbil’?
    Sorry, wrong thread.

  5. Johnny Roosh Says:

    Howzabout ‘fun gerbil’?

    I’m not sure if we’ve even started that thread yet.

  6. Kermit Says:

    You guys lay off Clownie’s “fun gerbil”.

  7. Night Writer Says:

    Rush might say “oreo” but he’d never actually throw them at a black politician. That’s a claim the certain members of the left can’t make.

  8. nerdbert Says:

    Ah yes, the famous leftist derision of Powell and Thomas, that they’re Oreos. I think we can all agree Obama’s just not an Oreo; he’s not “white on the inside,” just ask Pastor Wright.

    To be fully correct, we have to put the correct “cookie” taxonomy for Obama as stawberry Oreo: black on the outside, pinko on the inside.

    .
    .
    .

    (Just waiting for clownie and peeve’s heads to explode at this point. 🙂

    (And yes, it’s an evil joke. Sort of. Well, maybe. We’ll see how devoted he is to socialized medicine.)

  9. Bill C Says:

    I heard Rush sum up Gates’ situation pretty well, something along the lines of: “Here we have a black man, who lives in a multi-million dollar house, in one of the ritziest areas of Cambridge. He not only a professor at the most prestigious college in the country, he is the chair of an entire department…who just returned from a trip to China filming a documentary. Oppressed? Hardly.”

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