AVERAGE AMERICAN BLUES. Plagued by bigot and bullshit eruptions, the Right cries out that they still have the support of the Average American. Jonah Goldberg:

This crowd is always insinuating that Fox News is the tool of corporate and Republican interests. And yet, Fox is more popular among the "little guys" -- you know the people, not the powerful. If you keep in mind that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, O'Reilly etc represent the victory of the Republican Party to be every much as populist (not always a good thing) as the Democrats you can decipher a great deal of the grumpiness and confusion of liberals who shriek about "right wing media."

The fact that grumpy liberals "shriek" is offered, one imagines, as further proof of their unpopulism and lack of Little Guy cred. No way the Average American would hang with them! Now, another working-class hero, John Podhoretz:

The problem is that American elites are weirdly immature. They should be sophisticated enough to know these things take time, but they have no patience... What's amazing is that the ordinary American shopping at Wal-Mart and going about her daily life, with no capacity to name the head of the Iraqi National Congress (or Tommy Franks, or Jerry Bremer), does have the patience that the experts, who really should know better, sadly lack.

Boy, these liberals sound like a pain in the ass, don't they? Always showing off how much they know! Whereas in JP's portrait of America, brave shoppers neither know nor care what the hell is going on, and are better, more patient people for it.

Of course, it may be that the Average American does notice some other stories in which he is also invoked, and which may cause him to wonder if his patience is still a virtue. Anchorage Daily News:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American worker now spends 237.5 days a year on the job, about 25 days a year more than in 1973... Since 1970, the number of U.S. families that regularly eat dinner together has dropped by a third, de Graaf said. The number of families that take vacations together has also dropped by a third. "In fact, vacations for American families are starting to disappear"...

The average U.S. worker gets just 13 vacation days a year, according to a 2003 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average Western European receives almost six weeks.

Meanwhile there's this interesting bit from the Southern Baptist Convention's Baptist Press:

It's hard to believe that a typical American family accepts a 30-year home mortgage as normal today or that it is now possible in some cases to borrow on a home for nearly 70 years... Today it requires from 40 to 70 percent of the average American family's total income to buy an average home, even with a 30-year mortgage.

The longest term of debt God's people took on in the Bible was about seven years. During the seventh year of remission, Jews were instructed to release their brothers from any indebtedness (see Deuteronomy 15:1-2).

Well, the Average American isn't going to see any such Jubilees anytime soon.

Perennial Average-American advocate NewsMax has a story up headlined, "Average American Lifestyle Called "Total Bull---t" by Environmentalist." NewsMax sneers at such analyses, but I wonder if a lot of Average Americans aren't beginning to feel the same way themselves.