JAMES TARANTO: Losing the Plot: Why coverage of Obama is so boring.

The problem with the story that Obama and his press sycophants tell is that it is so boring and stupid. It reduces the president and his supporters to stick-figure caricatures of good and evil. (We almost said comic-book characters, but that would be unfair to comic books.) We could fill a column with examples every day, but here are a few that have come across our desk just in the past 24 hours:

National Journal’s Norm Ornstein published a column yesterday titled “The Unprecedented–and Contemptible–Attempts to Sabotage Obamacare.” Although allowing that opposition to ObamaCare is “not treasonous”–a good thing, as a substantial majority of Americans would be traitors if it were–it is “sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials.” (What does “sharply beneath” even mean?)

The second paragraph of Ornstein’s column is comedy gold: “I am not the only one who has written about House and Senate Republicans’ monomaniacal focus on sabotaging the implementation of Obamacare–Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, Jon Chait, Jon Bernstein, Ezra Klein, and many others have written powerful pieces. But it is now spinning out of control.”

Ornstein acknowledges that what he has to say is utterly unoriginal, and to prove it he cites a long list of partisan hacks (all male, by the way; somebody alert Alicia Shepard!) who’ve said the same thing. Then he deploys a histrionic cliché in an attempt to justify the shopworn blather that follows.

It’s not just Obama who is boring. But read the whole thing.