In a classic Alterman move, he’s taken another vague cheap shot at me that misconstrues what I actually wrote:

A certain young blogosphere language cop recently took issue not only with my use of irony on the blog but also with my implication that the mainstream media have consistently treated President Bush as far more popular with Americans than he really is.

He then quotes from a poll showing President Bush’s low approval ratings and some silly analysis from an MSNBC anchor about how Bush’s response to Katrina is “going to be a win” as if these disproved my claims.

Once again, Alterman is being disingenuous. The first post he’s referring to pointed out that, on June 7, he wrote:

George W. Bush’s approval rating is now a full twenty points lower than Bill Clinton’s was on the day he was impeached. Dear media, that means you gotta stop referring to him as a “popular president,” and no less important, stop treating him like one.

But when I checked Nexis, I found that Chris Matthews was the only major media figure who had described Bush as a “popular president” since his second inauguration. I certainly never said that Bush was popular — indeed, I wrote in the same post that Bush’s popularity is a “myth” and linked to a post making that point back in March.

Then, on August 30, I pointed out that Alterman had made another direct claim about the press:

Will Bush become the most unpopular president in the history of Gallup Polling? Here. And will the mainstream media continue to refer to him as “well-liked” by the country?

So I checked Nexis and couldn’t find even a single example of anyone in the press using the phrase “well-liked” to describe President Bush during the previous six months. But I never denied that the press exaggerated Bush’s popularity — in fact, I agreed with Alterman’s premise: “The media does tend to overestimate Bush’s popularity, but that doesn’t mean you can just put phrases in quotes and claim people in the media are repeating them.”

However, since Alterman doesn’t have the courage to name me or link to my posts, his readers will never know any of this.

(See my previous posts on Alterman, especially this one, for more.)

Update 8/26: Apparently I’m also “whiney,” “self-pitying” and don’t know what irony is:

One additional irony of this story –note to whiney, self-pitying literalist language cops, look that up — is that because the refs worked the Times “liberalism” so effectively, in my opinion, they won themselves a completely baseless and self-defeating endorsement of the awful and incompetent George Pataki in his last election.