Don’t Let Bogus Polls Depress You
Rush Limbaugh
RUSH: Folks, there are a couple of polls out there today that are just outrageous. One is the CBS/New York Times poll. The other is the Washington Post poll. I’m telling you: They are irresponsible. They are designed to do exactly what I have warned …
This is what is roiling the Rightiesphere right now: Don’t believe them lying polls! Now, the predictable response from the Left and Middle has been to sort of chuckle at an act that seems — except for the disquieting fact that the highest levels of Rightopia are joining in the bray — delusional at best, or even a psychotic break with reality.
And that is where you’ve got to ask the next question.
I received forwarded emails today from Americans for Limited Government (Howie Rich), Eric Odom (Grassfire, founder of teapartydotcom) and Tea Party Express all saying the same thing:
from: CDBO Headquarters [email protected] [a/j/a Tea Party Express]
reply-to: [email protected]
to: ****
date: Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 5:53 PM
subject: Karl Rove + Dick Morris: The Polls Are a Lie!Dick Morris, Karl Rove & Scott Rasmussen were on Fox News Channel tonight and they articulated the message that we’ve been trying to convey to you for weeks. Don’t believe the major media polls. They are wrong. They are deliberately over-sampling Democrats, and it is adding several bogus points to Barack Obama’s numbers in the polls.
The media is doing this to depress conservatives – hoping that you will stop contributing to the campaign against Obama, that you won’t volunteer at the local Republican Victory Center, and that you’ll hopefully stay home on Election Day. Don’t let the media get away with this shameful behavior!
The good people at Breitbart.com have produced further evidence to show you the bias in the polling, again – being done to trick you into thinking Obama has already won….
OK: Remember that the invisible hand always leaves a footprint.
Do you really believe that Rush Limbaugh, Faux Nooz™, Karl Rove, Dick Morris and Scott Rasmussen (whose Rasmussen Reports, coincidentally publishes Howie Rich’s “column” every week or so) ALL had the same exact same psychotic break on the same day?
Come on. This is such a massive outlier on any “news” that we’ve seen before that it ought to throw up huge red flags.
Oh, and Breitbart (whose entire raison d’être is media manipulation and bullying) and Tea Party Express and Americans for Limited Government and Weekly Standard and Newsbusters and on and on and on. (Click and see!)
Look: these people are evil, but they’re not stupid. So: crazy?
Well, crazy like a fox, maybe.
Now, ask yourself the next question: if they are NOT crazy, and are working in lockstep (OK: goosestep) towards a common goal, then WHAT possible use could this wholesale rejection of “mass media” polling AND pretense that it’s all a GIGANTIC PLOT TO FIX THE ELECTION possibly be to them?
Now we’re getting somewhere.
Ask yourself this: since US polling has been consistently good and a wide number of polling organizations with no particular institutional bias are reporting the same things, can we A) believe that they are all marching in lock step in a giant conspiracy (like the Rightie blatherers and bigwigs and propagandists clearly are?) and B) that ALL our national polling groups have decided to commit business hari kiri (since “fixing” polls would destroy their credibility, and, therefore harm their funding/profit levels)?
Clearly A and B are bullshit.
So: WHY attempt to “work the refs” in the same manner that PBS’ Gwen Ifill was mercilessly badgered and browbeaten before 2008’s Vice Presidential debate, where Sarah Palin decided to single-handedly rewrite 2,500 years of tradition in democratic public debate and piss on the format and the intelligent viewer? Certainly it cowed Ifill into NOT throwing the yellow referee’s flag and demand that Palin DEBATE and not wink and say whatever her programmers had coded into her limited memory banks.
Palin’s speech notes
Why this sudden attack on the very concept of polling, if not a psychotic break? What does it gain them?
Judging by past actions, it may well be a harbinger of a stolen election to come.
Remember, Karl Rove and company have been given between half a billion and a billion dollars to guarantee the outcome of this election for the Republican candidate [INSERT NAME HERE]. Before the race was ever finalized, please note.
What will it cost for us to win?
And we know from past history just how Rove works. But let me refresh your memory:
A Research Report from the University of Pennsylvania
Graduate Division, School of Arts & Sciences Center for Organizational Dynamics
The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy
December 29, 2004Most Americans who listened to radio or surfed the internet on election day this year sat down to watch the evening television coverage thinking John Kerry won the election. Exit polls showed him ahead in nearly every battleground state, in many cases by sizable margins. Although preelection day polls indicated the race dead even or Bush slightly ahead, two factors seemed to explain Kerry’s edge: turnout was very high, good news for Democrats, and, as in every US presidential election with an incumbent over the past quarter-century, undecided voters broke heavily toward the challenger.
But then, in key state after key state, counts showed very different numbers than the polls predicted; and the differentials were all in the same direction…
And here is the conclusion, after detailed statistical analysis:
In this report, I have: (1) documented that, in general, exit poll data are sound, (2) demonstrated that it is exceedingly unlikely that the deviations between exit poll predictions and vote tallies in the three critical battleground states could have occurred strictly by chance or random error, and (3) explained why explanations for the discrepancy thus far provided are inadequate.
This remains fundamentally unexplained to this very day, down the memory hole along with “yellowcake uranium,” “weapons of mass destruction” and “torture.”
But the same liver-spotted hands are on the levers.
The same puppets keep mouthing exactly the same words
So, I put it to you, gentle reader: WHY do you think it is so important to the stealth GOP establishment to mount a concerted attack on the methodology and results of nearly every major polling organization in America today? Because Romney isn’t winning? Or to make sure that there’s plenty of future distraction with smoke and mirrors if Romney improbably wins?
Because I guarantee you that these vipers are not so psychotic that they aren’t fully aware of what poll numbers mean in the real world, and the accuracy of those poll results in half a century and more. Sorry, Karl.
If this is the likely possibility, it becomes incumbent and urgent that we pay attention to it.
If my speculations are mere leftist paranoia and fantastic delusion, it certainly can’t hurt to watch very carefully what happens when an analogous electoral situation to 2004 appears, combined with the anomalous ATTACK ON POLLING BEFORE THE ELECTION EVEN HAPPENS.
Or, let me put it this way, WERE there a massive voter fraud scheme to throw the election, a NECESSARY but not SUFFICIENT condition for the acceptance of this result would be to create mistrust of the polling data that would throw such a scheme’s results into UN-question.
And consider the projection of a media conspiracy to “game” the election. The Slandersphere always give away their tactics through projection. It’s their “tell” in political Five Card Stud.
ROVE MOTTO: If you can’t win fair and square … CHEAT!
I should note that, following her 2008 Vice Presidential debate moderation, Gwen Ifill has not been the least controversial whatsoever, and has evidently learned to behave herself, since any misbehavior would surely have failed to escape the attention of these hawk-eyed defenders of Truth, Justice and the American Way.
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today
I wish that man would go away.– Hugh Means (1875 – 1965)
So, Karl, do not ask for whom the poll tells. It tells on thee.
(With apologies to John Donne).
Courage.
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A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, an honorary Texan, Clown (ditto) and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.