Stupid polls at CNN.com are nothing new (MORE: HAS HILLARY HIT ROCK BOTTOM?)

There’s a minor uproar developing in the blogosphere over a poll CNN.com had on their website which asked the following question: “Does Barack Obama show the proper patriotism for someone who wants to be president of the United States?” Ben Smith at The Politico has a screen cap of the poll. At the time he wrote his post, the poll was on CNN.com’s main page, but there’s a “quick poll” question there now about last night’s Oscars.

First of all, the BO patriotism question they posted is one you’d expect to see asked on an opinion website, not a mainstream news outlet. The poll is beneath the standards most of us would expect major news network to adhere to. Not only that, but CNN automatically assumes in the question that everyone’s definition for what “proper patriotism” means are the same.

Josh Marshall at TPM implies here that it’s standard operating procedure for CNN to post polls that are biased against liberals, so I wonder what he’d think of the poll question CNN posted back on December 8, 2005, in which they asked, “Who’s stupider: Ann Coulter or Jeering UConn students?” (see here for a refresher on the Coulter/UConn story). I asked in my post on the wacky CNN poll, “What the heck? Is this the kind of juvenile polling we can expect from CNN here on out?”

Apparently not. I should note for the record that MSNBC is not above it, either.

So no, this isn’t any coordinated attempt by CNN to take down Barack Obama. It’s just par for the course for whoever writes the poll questions there. BO still enjoys a healthy amount of favorable, fawning coverage from the mainstream press, so lefties shouldn’t let one poll and one AP story questioning Obama’s patriotism bring them down. By contrast, I bet Hillary Clinton would love to be handling questions like this, rather than the ones about whether or not her campaign is finished.

In fact, there may well be a “backlash” from the left in response to the poll and story with more campaign contributions to the point where Obama can (again) falsely claim that his campaign is responsible “only to the people.” So lefties should look on the upside – where there are lemons, they can make lemonade. Country Time, of course – certainly not the real stuff.

Update: Check out Hillary’s latest, lowest tactic to date, which should renew the debate over whether it really was the Hillary campaign who was secretly circulating the stories about Obama’s “Muslim education” in early 2007 to alternative media outlets like Insight magazine. When Fox reported this as well is when BO started boycotting the network, a boycott he no longer observes.

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