For months, the political media have had nothing to talk about but polls and expectations. Yesterday reality crashed the party in Iowa, revealing the vacuity of the polls and the “expectations game.” Let’s examine how poll/expectations-based “analysis” differs from reality-based analysis. The polls were totally off Let’s compare two recent Iowa polls, the Quinnipiac poll done Sunday and…
The Donald Trump campaign’s 271-word statement about skipping the next debate is short, clear, and free of jargon. But it could have been much shorter, only six words: “I am afraid of Megyn Kelly.” I believe his strategic calculation was that this debate would not help him — people already know who he is — but that tangling again…
Conservative publication National Review invited prominent conservatives to explain why they’re against Donald Trump. I’ve never seen so many distinguished people so angry in such a florid and entertaining way. For wit to spread, it must be tweetable. So I made this little compilation for you. Have fun. General insults [tweetthis]We can talk about whether [Trump]…
When you hear an outlandish poll result, you first thought may be, “Wow, people are stupid.” You’d be wrong. Blame the pollsters and the people who publicize their spurious results, not the supposed “voters” they contacted. In the last month, we’ve heard these unbelievable poll results: 30% of likely Republican voters think we should bomb Agrabah, the fictional…
Death is a fact of life. Sayings like “rest in peace” and “our thoughts and prayers are with the victims” are euphemisms: they enable us to go on without thinking about death. Not thinking about death can help us cope, but let’s not imagine that we’re actually saying anything when we say these things. I’ve been thinking…
Sometimes the political media gets so tangled up in its own underwear that it’s comical. Musings about expectations don’t qualify as news — they should be marked “for entertainment purposes only.” That’s why I must ridicule Kathie Obradovich’s recent article in the Des Moines Register (also reprinted into the Boston Globe). There are candidate positions. There is…
When it comes to bullshit, nothing is more sublime than communist propaganda. North Korea says it tested an H-bomb this week (US officials say it was only a regular nuclear bomb). That’s terrifying. The official statement from the North Korean government isn’t really helping their cause though. I’d forgotten the loony nature of totalitarian communist Newspeak. The English translation…
Analysts predict not only what will happen next, but what will happen after that. Here’s my prediction: after losing in 2016, Donald Trump will form his own party, the Trumpist Party. Trump is divisive Trump thrills white men and scares nearly everybody else. Donald Trump is a hero for white, working-class men. As Kathleen Parker writes in the Washington Post,…
I recently got access to the secret playbook Donald Trump uses to generate a new, ever more outrageous policy every eight or nine days. I’ve used it to predict the next six weeks of Trump news stories: International loser database. “As soon as I get in office, the State Department will begin tracking losers in every governments on earth,”…