Another Great Moment, and Why It's Happening - by David

They just won't stop! President Obama is being roundly criticized for waiting 3 days before publicly responding to the Underwear Bomber incident. Is there a historical standard for how many days a president should wait? Yes, there is! President George W. Bush waited 6 days to publicly respond to the Shoe Bomber incident.

Face it. There is a blatant, well organized smear campaign to discredit anything and everything that can be even remotely connected to the current administration. Three days vs. six days does not matter. To Rush "I Hope He Fails" Limbaugh and the rest of the "right-wing" there is both no time and no need to vet such trivial data. It's all about the quantity and the volume. They know that a lot of it will get through to the lazy, intransigent, and uncaring among us.

Is this administration the first to suffer such a campaign? Of course not! There was a well established newspaper and radio campaign against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930's. The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (1943) was one of the first (if not the first) neo-conservative "think tanks" to act as a collection point for special interest monies, and a leader in such campaigns. The number of such organizations exploded during and after the Nixon administration. Most of us now have forgotten (or never even knew!) the impact of these special interest organizations on the Carter and the Clinton administrations.

Is there a counterpart situation to this on the left? If you think there is, Id love to hear about it.