Today's unsolicited piece of advice- Don't piss on my head and tell me that it's raining

The subtle art of opinion polling and the even finer art of f**king it up completely

…a vanilla ice cream cone and an '85 Yugo with three bald tires?

Yeah, I know… we've all heard it repeatedly. JOE BIDEN IS OLD. I MEAN, LIKELY REALLY, REALLY OLD- like hand-crank telephones and texting with George Washington old.

Okay, so the man’s 81, and if he wins in November, he’ll be 86 when his term ends. So, he won’t be running with the bulls in Pamplona in the near future. But let’s not forget that his opponent isn’t young, either.

Donald Trump is 77 and arguably more prone to slurring words, losing his train of thought, and even showing early signs of dementia. Many who’ve been around him for some time have said that Trump isn’t well, and if you listen to his speeches, it seems clear he’s not what he used to be…if he ever was. And he wasn’t nearly a Nobel laureate in his prime, knowhutimean?

Moments like the above are frequent. I can't say what they’re attributable to. I’m a History and Anthropology major, so I’m barely qualified to pour myself a Scotch. I’m nowhere near qualified to diagnose speech and language disorders.

What I do know is that something isn’t right, and for Donald Trump to be casting aspersions on Joe Biden’s age, physical abilities, and/or mental capacity is disingenuous at best and downright hypocritical at worst. At 77, Trump is not appreciably younger than the President and is arguably in far worse health. His obesity, awful diet, and lack of regular exercise do not speak to someone set to live a long and healthy life.

Despite dishonest ads like the one below, the Trump campaign hasn’t been able to hide the reality that their candidate isn’t the picture of someone entirely in control of their faculties. Trump’s frequent slurring of words and loss of his train of thought should cause considerable concern.

It’s amazing what you can do when you take out-of-context clips, throw in some dishonest editing, and use it all to claim that President Biden is literally at death’s doorstep.

Wow, could Donald Trump’s campaign possibly be more unprincipled? And it’s only March.

Yet the mainstream media is focused like a laser beam on Joe Biden’s age, with almost no coverage of Donald Trump’s age-related issues. Et tu, journalistic titans?

Dan Pfeiffer

points out that Biden’s State of the Union address demonstrated the folly of Donald Trump’s “Sleepy Joe” strategy. It was never brilliant, but Trump was pretty pleased with himself for coming up with it, so he stuck with it. If nothing else, President Biden proved during his SOTU that, even at 81, he’s anything but “sleepy.”

Republican House members in the room tried to goad Biden into a mistake. Marjorie Taylor Greene, dressed in full MAGA regalia, staked Biden out as he walked to the dais and then tried to interrupt him while he spoke about border security.

None of it worked. Biden delivered a boffo performance, and the media coverage and online conversation have all been about the strength and vigor he demonstrated….

So much of American politics is about expectation setting. Points are rewarded not for succeeding, but for exceeding whatever expectations were set.

Biden did a great job delivering the speech by any measure. It was energetic and feisty and showed viewers how hard he would fight for them and their freedoms. But even if he hadn’t performed well, he still would have dramatically exceeded expectations.

Trump and the Republicans (with help from the political media) set a low bar for Biden. Generally, you want to raise expectations for your opponent to the point that they are impossible to meet. Trump did the exact opposite.

Indeed. Trump set the expectations bar for the President so low that there was almost no way he could’ve failed to exceed expectations. But the fact that Biden blew the SOTU out of the water was gratifying to those of his supporters who were ready for the age question to be put to bed.

So how about we take all of this garbage about Joe Biden’s age and do a garbage poll that we can run in the New York Times to show that the Presidential horse race is virtually a dead heat?

Or, as

Jeff Tiedrich

calls it, another “media-generated controversy.”

New York Times, what in the chrome-plated fuck are you doing?

Democrats who had finally calmed down from the last round of media-created controversy spent the entire weekend running around in panic.

ok, let’s all take a deep breath and think about this for a moment.

look, I’m not a math guy and I don’t know shit about polling methodology. put a gun to my head and I still couldn’t tell you what a crosstab is — but I do know when I’m being force-fed a narrative.

I don’t want to be one of these nitwits who rejects every piece of bad news as “fake” — that’s the other side’s thing — but don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.

we’re now a month into primary season — with actual, tangible results as to how Biden and Trump are doing — and none of the data being pushed by the Times aligns with one fucking iota what we’ve been seeing out in the real world.

Never mind that the methodology of the Times poll led to some very questionable results:

Did someone not think double-checking the results might be a good idea before releasing them to the public?

Jay Kuo

had a similar reaction:

I agree. If you see a poll and half the women are voting for Trump, something went wrong in the polling sample. If women voted like they did in 2020, which we should assume would at least be the case especially since Dobbs, that’s an 11 point difference from this poll. Assuming the poll is half men, half women, that would put the two candidates about even.

But what makes the Times poll look like ten miles of bad road is how Democratic longshot Dean Phillips polled. To call him a long shot would be an insult to long shots who might have a statistical chance of success.

Who the holy, ever-lasting fuck is Dean Phillips?

now let’s talk about Dean Phillips. the Times’ polling has him at 12%. what the fuck? this is the same Dean Phillips who has come in dead last in every primary, with numbers that are a rounding error away from zero — and in Nevada’s case, actual zero.

South Carolina - 1.7%

Nevada - 0.0%

Michigan - 2.7%

he’s been finishing behind Marianne Williamson, who at the time of these primaries had suspended her campaign — but all of a sudden he’s magically ten times more popular than he was last week?

Yeah, even Phillips knows the fragrant smell of fresh, undiluted bullshit when he comes across it:

And guessing that 5% know who he is might be a significant overestimation…but for the Times to show that he’s polling at 12%? I’m from Minnesota, and I didn’t even know who Dean Phillips was until a few months ago. To honestly say that one of eight Americans would vote for him if the election were to be held today?

Wow…you might as well say one in eight Americans are sniffling glue at this very moment.

Sure…and I’ve got an ice fishing hut in Tucson I’d like to sell you.

Unless something goes haywire between now and November 5th, we’ll probably have a rerun of 2020. For the next seven-plus months, we’ll have a significant helping of Sturm und Drang, and then Joe Biden will win by a sizable margin, just as happened in 2020.

Donald Trump and his sycophants will then piss and moan incessantly about the election being stolen (again), and we’ll have to listen to the same complaints we did in 2020. It will be every bit as tiresome, and maybe we’ll even have a January 6-style wienie roast on the Capitol grounds again.

Who says history isn’t circular? And ridiculous?

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