m0llusk: Barak Obama has been low key and keeping focus consistently on the positive.

Other than sniveling about Maureen Dowd making fun of his ears, of course. He'll need thicker skin than that to survive a primary against Hillary. She'll throw every bit of mud at him she can find and then invent more.

Unright: I don't get why all the GOPers are desperate to hate Obama.

*raises hand*

I'm a GOPer and I can't help but notice this interesting lost-in-translation phenomenon that keeps happening:

Someone who loves Obama: "I just love Obama!"

Someone else: "I don't know much about him yet. He certainly bears watching."

Someone who loves Obama: "WHY DO YOU HATE OBAMA?!?!?!???"

jsnbase: This wouldn't be a call to dig up dirt, would it?

Damn straight. Some guy wants to run for prez he'd better be ready for it, too. I want to know EVERYTHING there is to know about Obama; I'm not inclined to fall in love with him simply because he's shiny and new.

filth: "Media" is plural.

But good headline.

Sorry, but usage always trumps etymology:

me·di·a

-noun
1.a pl. of medium.
2.(usually used with a plural verb) the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely: The media are covering the speech tonight.
-adjective
3.pertaining to or concerned with such means: a job in media research.

-Usage note: Media, like data, is the plural form of a word borrowed directly from Latin. The singular, medium, early developed the meaning "an intervening agency, means, or instrument" and was first applied to newspapers two centuries ago. In the 1920s media began to appear as a singular collective noun, sometimes with the plural medias. This singular use is now common in the fields of mass communication and advertising, but it is not frequently found outside them: The media is (or are) not antibusiness.

mr_shhh: He's a smoker, and he's black.

Obama smokes? I guess the smear machine is on the blink. I have never heard that.

jsnbase: you've never known everything there is to know about a candidate

No reason not to still found out everything you can rather than be entranced by his dazzling smile.

you have options beyond 'LOVE HIMMMMM' and 'let's find the stinkiest piece of poo he ever created and fling it across the nation.'

True enough. Like I said a minute ago, though, that dichotomy seems to be more of a problem with his fans. I can't count the times I've said something along the lines of "Obama's still an unknown--almost no record. I don't know what I think of him yet," and have gotten the response "Why are you right-wingers in such a hurry to hate his guts?"

Verbing Your Noun: MyNameIsNotMervGriffin: get off the cross. Do you think people might be overly sensitive since the right wing smear machine has been so swift an successful in the past.

It has?

You mean like when Al Gore started running TV spots about the guy who committed murder on Dukakis' furlough program, but everyone still thinks Bush 41 did it?

Or all the sneering Howard Dean did at John Kerry's military preening before anyone ever heard of the Swiftboaters?

Grow up. Smearing and mudslinging is hardly a right-wing bailiwick; both sides do it all day, every day, against their own party members just as much as the others'.

All I'm saying is that if I don't love Obama, it doesn't mean I hate/fear him. All I know about him is that everyone thinks he's cute, he's really, really new to national politics and he wrote a book with a lot of platitudes but few meaty positions.

Like I said, he bears watching. Don't love him; don't hate him. Haven't decided yet. If you think that makes me a mudslinger shaking in my boots at the new kid in town, make yerself happy.

/like I care all that much about what someone in a semi-anonymous forum thinks about me