"Tragedy Pimps" Not Getting Over

Via Powerline and Instapundit comes this interesting bit of fresh polling data:

Americans are broadly critical of government preparedness in the Hurricane Katrina disaster — but far fewer take George W. Bush personally to task for the problems, and public anger about the response is less widespread than some critics would suggest.

Note that the level of government is not specified - a topic we looked at yesterday. It was Louisiana's and New Orleans' governments that dropped the ball in the run-up to and aftermath of Katrina, not the feds. Note also, as Brother Meringoff observes, that now that the federal response is in full swing, whatever daylight there was for convincingly attacking the President is gone.

That window of PR opportunity was narrow to begin with, which is why the Left pounced as alacritously as it did. Their handicap, as usual, is the promiscuity of their Bushophobia. If so much as a single kitty-cat gets trapped up a tree, all of liberaldom shrieks that the President is a "cat-hater" who should be impeached for his "cruelty to animals," and the Extreme press immediately dubs the trumped up incident "Feligate." The number of scandalmongering gimmicks the DisLoyal Opposition has thrown at Dubya over the past six years rivals the number of Clinton scandals they spun and helped cover up. Their Bush-bashing has become a wheezy, hackneyed cliche, which would seem to suggest that none of them ever heard the story of the boy who cried wolf, or expressions like "keep your powder dry" or "don't fire 'till you see the whites of their eyes."

The public isn't buying it, or Cindy Sheehan, because it's become too easy to tune out the minority party's relentlessly crass vituperating - and because most people do not, and are never going to, hate George W. Bush. And that is something that left-wing extremists are incapable of understanding.

Maybe Hillary can save them from themselves in 2008. They'd better hope so, because it's looking more and more like nobody else can.