NOW EVERYBODY SKATE COUNTERCLOCKWISE!

I see that the media and the right have settled on the notion that Barack Obama is expending too much energy in too many directions:

Yesterday's edition [of Mark Halperin's daily video blog post for Time] was especially illustrative of how political analysis often goes horribly awry.

Halperin was joined by MSNBC's Louis Burgdorf, and they agreed about the "big story." As Halperin explained, "All this dialog, this debate, about whether Obama's trying to do too much." ...

The meme is steadily becoming a favorite of the media establishment -- conservatives have been pushing the "distraction" line pretty aggressively, and reporters have been picking up on it...

Glad to have that clarified, especially with regard to the conservatives. You see, a month ago, when Obama had the nerve to spend a weekend at Camp David and then tell reporters he looked forward to spending time there in the summer, the wingnuttosphere declared him a pathetic slacker:

A Freeper: "Dang that man-child is lazy!"

A righty blogger: " ...you know how hard it is to go out every night to a ball, go to parties, and make a speech here and there. It's not like he should be trying to do, you know, real work."

A libertarian blogger: "President Barack Obama was in office less than three weeks and he has already taken his first vacation?!? And I thought I heard him say we were in the middle of an unprecedented crisis that required immediate action. I guess that means immediate action after he has some R & R"

A white supremacist message board participant: ...Er, you probably don't want me to go there.

So now he's not a shiftless clock-watcher -- he's doing too much. Though if he dials it down, I'm sure he'll go right back to being shiftless again.