Piggy-backing off a dreadful Politico piece this week, Daniel Henninger places a 911 call to the etiquette police and whines that Obama is “bad-mouthing” his opponents (“mocking” them) and unleashing “invective.” He's going negative.

How many direct quotes does Henninger includes to illustrate Obama'a alleged mean streak? Zero.

That's probably because Henninger couldn't find any, so he just made up the whole premise. That's kind of what Politico did this week. It based an entire article around how Obama is supposedly getting up in everyone's face. But (oops!) Politico couldn't really find any quotes to prove that point so it paraphrased Obama being nasty.

Lazy Henninger doesn't even make that lame attempt.

UPDATED: Check out the column's headline [emphasis added]:

Smart Aleck-in-Chief?: There may be good reasons for Obama to go negative, but doing so could wreck his presidency

I always chuckle when Obama-haters like Henninger pretend to wring their hands over what will “wreck” the Obama presidency. It's amusing since the entire GOP Noise Machine is dedicated to trying to wreck it for him.

UPDATED: How dumb is Henninger? Or perhaps to be kind about it, how dumb does Henninger pretend to be? Behold:

Barack Obama's approval rating is heading toward 40%

Right, because for the last eight months Obama's approval rating has barely budged from 50%, according to Gallup. So of course that means Obama's “heading toward 40%.”

Using the same Henninger logic, I'm now going to declare that Obama's approval rating is “heading” toward 60%. (Hey, this is fun!)