Peggy Noonan is unfamiliar with public polling

Or let's put it this way, she's willing to pretend she has no idea what public polling is when it suits the interest of her column. So she writes an entire piece about how devastating Obama's bow in Japan was to the president's reputation (the image “took off” and became “iconic”) without mentioning that, oh yeah, a strong majority of Americans approved of the bow. And even a majority of Republicans thought the bow was fine.

Noonan writes a column in which she suggests that almost overnight the Obama bow became the defining image of his supposedly failed presidency (she can just feel it), and yet Noonan forgets to mention that most Americans, and even most Republicans, approved of the bow.

Which means this point is worth repeating as you read Noonan's latest filing from the parallel universe:

Yet more proof that the right-wing noise machine doesn't even reflect mainstream conservatives. It's just its own bizarre, fact-free world that whips up an endless stream of nonsensical allegations that only truly radical Obama haters care about.

UPDATED: Watching Peggy Noonan, who worked for (and worshiped) Ronald Reagan, now regularly re-write Reagan history is more than a little amusing. However, it does not speak well of her attempts at intellectual honesty.

For weeks now, Noonan has been writing about how Obama's not up to the job, about how his presidency is slipping away, and Americans are turning against him. And now, with the bow, about how Obama's getting tagged as a failure. What she conveniently ignores is the fact that Obama's current job approval rating stands at almost the exact same spot Reagan's did ten months into first year in office. Noonan wants to write Obama off as a first-year failure, even though Obama's first year has unfolded almost exactly as her hero Reagan's did.

In fact, Reagan's second year, in terms of job approval, was a complete catastrophe, as his rating plunged into the mid-30's. But Noonan ignores all that and pretends that Reagan sailed through his first term in office.

Here's Noonan re-writing history in her latest column:

You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year. Gerald Ford did, and Ronald Reagan too, more happily.

According to Noonan, Regan was “happily” tagged with a public persona his first year; a first year that looked almost exactly like Obama's, which she presents as a growing failure. But if Reagan was “happily” tagged in year one, than how does Noonan explain Reagan's second year in office, in which his administration virtually collapsed?

Seems that if Noonan's going to re-write Reagan history on a weekly basis now, she's going to have to be less sloppy about it.