there's legitimate criticism of Obama, and then there's crap...

...and spraying perfume on crap doesn't change the fact that it's crap. In this case, the perfume consists of soliciting an article from a Johns Hopkins professor and placing it in the Wall Street Journal, thereby giving it the illusion of legitimacy.

The article, by Fouad Ajami, contends that it is the left side of the political spectrum that is unthinking, demonizing, and addicted to Barack Obama's "politics of charisma." In Ajami's world, the right wing protesters at town hall meetings are the epitome of reasoned, well-founded discourse. The problem, of course, is that Ajami's column doesn't demonstrate even a minimal level of understanding concerning what reasoned discourse actually is. If this is an example of his argumentation skills, one can only conclude that Mr. Ajami shouldn't be teaching at all. His column demonstrates that he lacks the capacity to warrant his arguments. The column is full of sweeping claims about political history (with no data), Obama's intentions (impossible to demonstrate, and no data), comparisons between Reagan and Clinton (with no data), and laughable valorization of town hall meeting attendees (with no concrete examples of any good arguments being advanced at those meetings, while Ajami completely ignores facts like half-drunk protesters shouting "I want my country back" while holding up birth certificates; shouting down women in wheelchairs; threatening the president and supporters of reform with guns; and spurious, ill-informed charges of "socialism"...) Nor does Ajami acknowledge the meta-criticism that most of these protests that give him such a hard-on are carefully engineered "astroturfing."

There are plenty of good criticisms of Obama out there. This one is an unsubstantiated piece of crap.