Byron York sez:

But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

Now, there's only one logical way to interpret this: the actual measure of how popular the president's policies are shouldn't include black people, because they skew the results off from the people who actually count. Blacks are effectively subhuman drones, mindlessly following along behind anyone with dark enough skin. This means, of course, that Tom Maguire will step in to explain why this isn't the case.

What could it possibly mean? Gosh - how about, on some issue black voters support the man rather than the position, and if a white Democrat takes a similar position he will find less-than-expected support.

Is any example involving blacks and Obama too fraught with emotion? Well, suppose white evangelicals supported Bush's adventures in the Middle East because, although the issues were over their heads, they trusted a God-fearing Christian to do the right thing. In such a scenario, neither McCain nor Romney could pick up Bush's banner, even if they backed the same policies. One might say that Bush's position was less popular than it appeared.

One might say that, true. Of course, that not only requires a wholesale rewrite of York's point, it's also a different fucking (yet equally stupid) point. Yes, different politicians have different levels of popular support for the things they say, which is the entire point of being a politician. Saying that something is less popular than it appears because the person selling it is a better salesperson of the issue not only doesn't make sense, it's like saying that Crank: High Voltage is actually a more popular movie than The Dark Knight once you remove everyone who ever read a comic book, because that's an irrelevant advantage.

Of course, we could also do this another way: just have bin Laden read off each party's platform, and whichever one Americans hate less wins everything. Yes, that seems fair.