The PrezNitWit certainly has lived up to his promise to be a Uniter, not a Divider.

81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on the Wrong Track

Astounding.

There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

Ya think?

I only have one question for the fine journalists at the New York Times. Exactly what would it take for you to consider a generally held belief to be more than “nearly” a national consensus?

There’s an annoying feature at the online version of the NY Times. (Presumably they do this on purpose so it’s probably not a bug.) Double-click on any word there and you get a helpful(?) popup with a definition of the word clicked, or it points you elsewhere in the Times’ archives to help you understand something you really just wanted to highlight and copy.

So the Times itself informs me (and the writers of the article you would think) that “consensus” is a “general agreement or accord.” In an era where Sir George Wrong-A-Lot insisted that winning 50.7% of the popular vote was reason enough to declare a “mandate” to wreck this nation, I figure 65% to 75% constitutes a consensus. 81% is as close as you get to a unanimous declaration.

Here’s a clue. When only 4% of those polled say say the country is better off than five years ago, it’s an actual consensus that we’re in the toilet. It’s “nearly” universal.

God they can be annoying in their insistence on presenting the illusion of journalistic objectivity over just plain common sense and judgment. That kind of reporting is simply bending over backwards to present “both” sides as if the elephant in the room can be balanced by a snowflake.

Honestly, you could get more than 4% of Americans to agree that Hitler wasn’t so bad (judging by Jonah Goldberg’s book sales anyway). I wouldn’t be surprised to find more than 4% of the people nodding in appreciation if Ann Coulter proposed that the whole slavery-is-bad thing was blown out of proportion — just cry-baby liberal whining.

Hell, 4% probably didn’t understand the question.

The left may have been far out in front on the idea of Bush being pretty damn bad for America and what he and his henchmen were up to was simply wrong, wrong, wrong; but we’re all liberal fascists now.

Oh, just in case you think this is just a fluke, a blip, that things will even out soon, or that people just don’t understand and are victims of a conspiracy warping their perceptions, the Washington Post is reporting that the “U.S. economy shed 80,000 jobs in March,” bringing the first quarter numbers close to a quarter million jobs eliminated so far this year.

I think we chip away at that stubborn 4%, don’t you?