One can certainly tend towards the hyperbolic when dealing with the current state of our politics. The opponent in this election (as well as 2016 and 2020) could be described in multiple ways and none of them have any connection to actual reality. Some would describe him as a cartoon villain. Others might describe him as the real life adult Eric Cartman. In the past, I have described him as a Bond villain post-traumatic brain injury. These are all funny in their own way, but for some they don’t carry much weight.

So, let me describe something that is concrete and potentially disastrous for our country. The current iteration of the GOP has no platform and no real ideology. It basically has become “whatever that guy says it is.” Ideology has to govern your party. Right or wrong, your party has to have a common framework and conception of how the world works. The other side might and likely will poke holes in that framework, but it gives you a baseline for decision making and core values.

I am only 50 years old. Many in our audience here have me by a decade or two. So, this seems weird for me to say, but I remember a time when Russia was the enemy. I remember a time when the worst thing the GOP could hang on you was either the communist label or to be painted as a Russian sympathizer. Instead of holding any candidate to that standard, the party has shifted based on a cult of personality and the fact that their standard bearer has a weird dictator fetish.

That is assuming the very best of the situation. The alternative is that their standard bearer is either under control for financial/blackmail reasons or is unwittingly under their control. I’d like to believe that his followers are blindly following him over this cliff, but we can’t rule out the possibility that some or all are paid stooges as well. I could point to numerous examples within the right wing media, but doing so would be giving attention to people that desperately crave it.

One recent example saw Vladimir Putin apparently advertising for disaffected conservatives and mouth breathers to move to Russia to get away from western liberalism. Indeed. We know a few things. We know that Russia interfered with our election in at least 2016 if not 2020 as well. We know they have spied on us. We know that our last president sided with Putin when it came to all of this information over his intelligence agencies and we know he shared confidential and top secret information with their bureaucrats.

We also know that Russia invaded a sovereign country unprovoked. Yet. voices on the right in government and commenting outside of it that have openly asked what is wrong with that. They have questioned whether we should be involved at all with even a few suggesting we should support Russia. Maybe we need a replay of cold war era movies where Russia is cast as the enemy. Maybe millions of Americans need to be reminded that dictators are not our friends. Maybe it just doesn’t matter anymore and we just need this spell to be broken. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills and I know I’m not the only one.

Did you ever not answer a phone call because you didn’t recognize the phone number on your caller ID? Yeah, me too.

It’s a fact in the 21st century that we now screen our calls because of scammers, phishers, telemarketers, bots, and cold call salesmen. We even screen our emails and text messages.

So how in the ever-blazing fires of H-E-double-hockey-sticks do we think we can use the same techniques to conduct public opinion surveys that we used in the pre-internet days? If it makes any sense, it makes no sense at all.

The last time that I answered the phone to a political pollster, it turned out to be a “push poll.” Its purpose was not to gauge public opinion but instead to elicit a reaction for or against a candidate. For example, “Do you favor allowing millions of illegal aliens with fentanyl and COVID into our country, or do you want to elect Joe Blow?”

That was the last time I participated in a telephone poll, and my responses were all as disingenuous as the poll.

This graph from Pew Research underscores the whole issue.
Get it? Over a 25-year period, phone poll response rates have dropped from 36% to 3%, a whopping drop of 1200%!

Pollsters have defended their science by citing a growing reliance upon online surveys. But excuse me if I object: online response is the antithesis of gathering data with any statistical significance at all. There is a high probability that mainly interested parties will be the primary respondents.

A caveat is that polling results always note an error bar or “margin of error”. And probably the only positive thing on that front is that the percent error is about 50% higher than those that I noted in polls a couple of decades ago.

The best thing that I can say about polling these days is that it reveals relative change over time. But the common conclusion that “It’s gonna be tight” is anachronistic in a time when winners’ and losers’ vote totals  always fall within 5% of each other.

I confess that I have never served in the military. Vietnam was the war of my youth and I was against that immoral and illegal war. But in the end, the draft lottery kept me out of it.

Captain Bonespurs had his own way to avoid fighting in that war because the draft lottery wasn’t invented yet. But I don’t know if TFG was opposed to that particular war (like me), war in general, or his fighting in any war.

I suspect the latter because of things we now know about him since he couldn’t stop mentioning how American soldiers buried in a World War 1 battlefield cemetery were chumps and losers.

That explains a lot.

It explains why stolen valor is such a touchstone in this year’s presidential campaign. Belittling Governor Walz’s 24 tears of service in the National Guard has become a something of a contest among MAGA Republicans these days.

But it’s OK. Captain Von Schitzenpantz has given stealing Walz’s valor his seal of approval.

So it should not be any surprise that the man was moved to denigrate the Medal of Honor by claiming that the civilian Medal of Freedom was a superior award because a recipient didn’t have to get shot at or killed in order to earn it: Mrs. Adelson only had to donate many millions of dollars to MAGA causes to get her medal.

Lesson: If you give TFG your money, you’re a hero. If you die for your country, you’re some dumb schmuck.

Besides Captain Ronny Jackson, TFG’s former physician while he was playing at being a president, Congressman Troy Nehls (TX CD-22) has written a couple of books.

Borderless By Design and The Big Fraud. Both Nehls and Jackson are ex-military, both are Texans with their own Texas congressional districts, and both Ronny and Troy even use the same publisher, Post Hill Press which specializes in “conservative political nonfiction works”.

But what sets the two apart is that while Ronny can report no income from his book deal, Troy can report negative income. His publisher has realized more profit from selling his book to Troy than Troy has received from his publisher. That’s what one may conclude from Nehls’s FEC filing.

Look here and scroll about a third of the way down to the line showing disbursement to Post Hill Press: for $5915.02 on February 1st. For “printing”.

For printing?

In one way to look at it, it would appear that Troy Nehls laid out some of his campaign cash to buy some copies of his own book. I assume he hands them out to loyal constituents because that’s what I would do with several hundred copies of my own book.

If it weren’t for the fact that his campaign donors foot the bill for his largesse, that would have made quite a dent in his pin money.

As well as you, I didn’t spend one nanosecond listening to the TFG/Musk livestream on Monday.

I’d rather watch grass grow.

I’d rather listen to gravel in my car’s hubcap.

But what we all missed got the attention of every late-night host or writing staff the following day: The Former Guy sounded like
Sylvester on steroids. No, not Stallone, the Looney Toons cartoon character, Sylvester the Cat, who craves the sweet taste of Tweetie Bird.

It is a speech impediment known as a “sloppy lisp.” You can hear it on this audio clip.

Was TFG having a “Polident moment”?

As explained by audio engineers, the lisp was an effect of audio compression for the livestream, as the Orange Buffoon sounded “just fine” from where he was videoed at home. Or, as TFG’s advisor, Steven Cheung helpfully observed: “Must be your sh**ty hearing. Get your ears checked out.”

Maybe so. But maybe Elon ought to look into who was in charge of Twitter’s (now X’s) audio compression programs, and why did he fire them.

It seems that TFG’s former White House Physician, Captain Ronny Jackson (Ret.), wrote a book. I had no idea that he could write a book, but then, maybe he can’t.

I mean, anyone could write a book. I could write a book. I just don’t think anyone would buy it. And that’s what I mean about being able to write a book. One of the requirements is that someone else reads the book, and that means that they have bought the book.

People don’t buy Ronny’s book.

How do I know this? This is Captain Ron’s annual FEC income report. It lists all of his sources of income, alphabetically by asset.

Look between NVIDIA and Roth. There is nothing listed there that even approximates “Post Hill Press”. That’s the poor and unfortunate publisher of Ronny’s book Holding the Line. Alas, Ronny has listed no royalties received from his publisher.

Small wonder. When you look online for that title, you get an ad for Thriftbooks.com and a list price of $4.99 (a savings of $23.01 off the list price).

Do you know what you get as well? Every other book entitled “Holding the Line”.

I guess in the book-writing world, there is a lot of line holding.