As you know, the usual suspects on the right are attacking Obama’s planned Martha’s Vineyard vacation. So CBS’s Mark Knoller ran the numbers and found that Obama has spent far fewer days vacationing as of this point than either George W. Bush or Saint Ronald Reagan had:

So far, President Obama has taken 61 vacation days after 31 months in office. At this point in their presidencies, George W. Bush had spent 180 days at his ranch where his staff often joined him for meetings. And Ronald Reagan had taken 112 vacation days at his ranch.

Among recent presidents, Bill Clinton took the least time off — 28 days.

You’d think that this would shut down this idiotic story for good. But it hasn’t done a thing to slow the attacks. Barely 12 hours after Knoller set the record straight, the Republican National Committee unveiled a new Web site, called ObamaGetAway.com, which lampoons the president with a series of delightful faux postcards showing Obama eating ice cream and frolicking in the surf.

It seems that even some on the left are worried that Obama’s vacation is “bad optics,” particularly given the bad economy. After all, everyone still recalls that Bill Clinton famously polled on the idea of taking a vacation at Martha’s Vineyard before opting instead for Wyoming. And some news accounts are subtly hinting that the Obama team set up his bus trip through the midwest in part to preempt any damage the vacation might cause.

Obama’s team seems not to be publicly engaging on the vacation issue, in part out of their conviction that the Beltway pundits who chatter about these sorts of things are badly out of touch with how regular Americans view them — and that letting the pundits set the agenda is fruitless.

Either way, what makes this whole meme particularly ridiculous is the basic fact about it that’s hiding right there in plain sight: Presidential vacations have nothing in common with conventional vacations. As Knoller, a veteran White House reporter, wryly puts it:

To be fair, a presidential vacation away from the White House is not the same as a vacation for the average person. The president is still in contact with his advisers and on call for any emergency.

Bad optics or no, I have a sneaking suspicion that the public fully grasps the relevant basic realities of modern travel and communications.