If only there had been puppies being tortured on the border. Those images surely would have been used, pulling out all the stops for visual emotional manipulation.

The leftist media establishment threw in every propaganda tool it has, from heart-rending videos of children of color behind chain link fences to abundant tears: crying children and MSNBC hosts Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachel Maddow weeping on air.

And yet the Rasmussen poll yesterday showed:

When families are arrested and separated after attempting to enter the United States illegally, 54% of Likely U.S. Voters say the parents are more to blame for breaking the law. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that only 35% believe the federal government is more to blame for enforcing the law. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.) To help understand the current political debate over the children issue, a closer look shows that 82% of Republicans and 56% of voters not affiliated with either major political party feel the parents are more to blame for breaking the law. But 60% of Democrats say the government is more to blame for enforcing the law. Seventy-five percent (75%) of Democrats think the Trump administration is too aggressive in trying to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States, a view shared by only 23% of Republicans and a plurality (46%) of unaffiliated voters. Among all voters, 49% say the administration is too aggressive trying to stop illegal immigration. Twenty-five percent (25%) say it's not aggressive enough, while 21% view the administration's policies as about right. Fifty-four percent (54%) agree with President Trump when he says, "The United States will not be a migrant camp. And it will not be a refugee-holding facility – it won't be." Thirty percent (30%) disagree, while 16% are undecided.

Considering the magnitude of the effort, this is a belly-flop for the manipulators. Remember that the counter-offensive is just getting started, with President Trump's executive order giving Democrats what they actually demanded (an end to separations) but not what they really wanted (an end to arrests of border-violating people who bring along a child).

There are grave dangers for the Dems now. As former NeverTrump presidential candidate David French reminds us:

[T]hose of us with a trace of historical memory know that the Trump administration is merely asking the courts and Congress to adopt the Obama administration's legal position. Yes, you read that correctly. As the Trump administration seeks to modify the Flores consent decree to allow for family detention past 20 days – and as GOP members of the House and Senate introduce bills that would overrule Flores – they are following in Obama's footsteps. Don't believe me? Read the exact words of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Flores v. Lynch, the 2016 case that extended the Flores consent decree to cover children with families: In 2014, in response to a surge of Central Americans attempting to enter the United States without documentation, the government opened family detention centers in Texas and New Mexico. The detention and release policies at these centers do not comply with the Settlement. The government, however, claims that the Settlement only applies to unaccompanied minors and is not violated when minors accompanied by parents or other adult family members are placed in these centers.

There are pictures of children in detention from the Obama years that elicited no outrage from the weepers and garment-renders on the left. Even CNN anchor Brook Baldwin was so taken with this failure that she asked Wisconsin Democrat Senator Tammy Baldwin whether or not she spoke out against family detention during the Obama years and got a lot of embarrassing verbal shuffling around in non-response as her answer:

However, by relentlessly hectoring the public with this propaganda blitz, the MSM were able to divert attention away from the release of the Horowitz I.G. report and, especially, the hearings with Horowitz testifying before a Senate and a House committee. But even this ploy may backfire, for Horowitz avoided connecting any dots as to the effects of bias, merely supplying the raw data that indicated it.

This means that those who are excavating that data (see Tadas Klimas today on these pages, for instance), have an audience that hasn't yet been overexposed and is ready to move on.