Another week, another WSJ column from Noonan harping on how unpopular Obama is. This, of course, from a women who worked as a Ronald Reagan's speechwriter and who knows fully well how in his second year in office Reagan bottomed out with a dismal 35% approval rating. But Noonan now plays wistfully dumb about the past and pretends that Obama's 50-ish approval ratings is cause for grave concern. It's deeply troubling.

Worse, this week Noonan just makes stuff up [emphasis added]:

A president in those circumstances must use all the goodwill he's built up over the months and years to get through that moment and survive doing what he thinks is right. Mr. Obama acts as if he doesn't know this. He hasn't built up popularity to use on a rainy day. If he had, he'd be getting through the Christmas plot drama better than he is.

That's part of an extended Noonan riff on Obama's popularity, so I'm assuming that Noonan's suggesting Obama's took a hit in the polls after the attempted terror attack from Christmas Day. That's what the “better than he is” means.

Well guess what? According to Gallup, Obama's job approval rating hasn't budged since Christmas Day. Which means that despite all the GOP Noise Machine caterwauling and its unprecedented attempted to immediately score political points off an attempted terror attack, the American public don't seem to be buying the blame game.

The truth is, despite the constant media chatter about Obama's supposedly falling approval numbers, according to Gallup's daily tracking poll, the president's rating has remained essentially unchanged since mid-August. Meaning, there has been no huge downward movement in the polls in recent weeks or months. But boy, the press sure loves to push that imaginary claim.

UPDATED: I chuckled when i read this Noonan passage:

If you mention to Obama staffers that they really have to be concerned about the polls, they look at you with a certain . . . not disdain but patience, as if you don't understand the purpose of politics. That purpose, they believe, is to move the governed toward greater justice.

Raise your hand if you think Noonan made this up. Meaning, raise your hand if you don't believe that Noonan, a professional partisan and dependable dispenser of GOP talking points, spends any time talking to “Obama staffers.”

Yeah, me neither.