Jack Kelly observes:

You’ve got to hand it to President Bush

For a pretty decent, straightforward guy, he sure has a knack for making enemies. His job approval rating is in the mid-30s, Nixon-during-Watergate levels. This is remarkable, considering that:

(1) The economy is in better shape than in all but a few months of the Clinton presidency, still fondly described by the news media as a time of milk and honey.

(2) There has been no successful terrorist attack on the United States since 9/11, contrary to the prediction of most terrorism “experts,” including yours truly.

(3) Iraq’s insurgency has pretty much been defeated. Al Qaida operatives there are being ratted out or hunted down by their erstwhile allies, and are looking to relocate.

(4) The president has appointed to the Supreme Court to justices who more than 60 percent of the American people believe to be superbly qualified.

Despite all this (at least apparent) success, President Bush is less popular than was Jimmy Carter, who presided over stagflation and gas lines at home and humiliation abroad.

Much of this is due to the utterly mendacious coverage by the news media of the war in Iraq. Most Americans think we’re losing a war we’re clearly winning.

I think Mr. Kelly is basically right, but overlooks the September miracle last year of the MSM’s turning public opinion fatally against this administration on the basis of a series of false reports revolving around Hurricane Katrina.

We in the Blogosphere took the success of blog reporting in exploding the fabricated CBS National Guard story as signalling a new era, in which MSM propaganda could readily be dissipated by the conservative blogosphere. Hurricane Katrina and Iraq War coverage both prove that incessant MSM broadcasting of a barrage of negative stories is still quite effective at molding public perception and opinion in a fashion immune to factual correction.

A day-after-day avalanche of mendacious Goliaths has been proven to be able to shout down Mr. Reynold’s “Army of Davids.”