Last night’s prime-time press conference, which I spoke of previously, was just 40 minutes long after the opening statement, including just 15 questions of which few were actually answered, allowed 0 follow-up questions and featured 1 of the longest known pauses in Presidential Press Conference History as Bush was forced to admit “I wish you’d have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it.”

Yet Rush panted onto the air this morning to instruct the DittoHeads that last night was “A SLAMDUNK GRANDSLAM HOMERUN!”

Mixed sports metaphors aside — one might wonder what the basis is for his claim, as the bulk of media reports have been contrary to that notion (though, as he also informed us, the Media is obviously now working for the Kerry Campaign).

Perhaps it was the overnight polls that told him so. But as of this hour, there have been no overnight polls yet released that I know of. There is, however, a “Live Vote” at MSNBC, an unscientific Internet Poll which shows that of 115,209 responses to the question “How would you grade President Bush’s performance in the prime-time news conference?” The results were %34 Excellent/Very Good, %11 Average and a whopping %55 Poor/Disaster. Of course, that poll is unscientific, and therefore indicative of nothing. I report it only to be as irresponsible and misleading as Rush.

So could Rush’s bluster have been little more than a desperate effort to try and rally Bush’s rapidly evaporating base by suggesting something he’d like them to believe without any actual evidence to back it up? Who, Rush?

A few minutes later Rush referred to the Consumer Confidence Index as being at “an all-time high!” He didn’t mention precisely which Index he was referring to, but such a claim should be easily verifiable somehow, right?

I checked the PollingReport.com’s Consumer Confidence page which lists all of the latest polls on this topic. It was updated with polls released as recently as today (4/14). A check of the numbers on that page, however, would show anything but Consumer Confidence at “an all-time high”.

Consumer Confidence, however, is based on little more than Confidence in the economy by the Consumer. A number that may be influenced by many things, including someone with a huge national listenership telling Consumers that Consumer Confidence is at “an all-time high”.

Hmmm…I’m starting to suspect that Rush may have some sort of an agenda. That he may not be giving his DittoHeads the full story each day. It’s almost as if he says untrue things in order to convince his millions of listeners that they are actually true despite all evidence to the contrary. Who would possibly be dumb enough to fall for that? Certainly not the DittoHeads, who as Rush likes to tell them, are “the smartest, most well-informed listeners in the country bar none.”