The Phony Campaign

2015-06-14 Update

[phony baloney]

PredictWise punters have dropped Elizabeth Warren below our (arbitrary) 2% probability threshold for becoming our next president. But Joe Biden's back at 2%. And we welcome Rick Perry to our poll for the first time; he's also at 2%.

So our adjusted lineup:

Query String Hit Count Change Since
2015-06-07
"Jeb Bush" phony 961,000 -599,000
"Hillary Clinton" phony 414,000 +13,000
"Martin O'Malley" phony 228,000 -61,000
"Rand Paul" phony 187,000 -3,000
"Joe Biden" phony 146,000 -
"Marco Rubio" phony 126,000 +16,000
"Rick Perry" phony 104,000 -
"Scott Walker" phony 103,000 -5,000

  • Rand Paul's campaign store will sell you a genuine fake Hillary's Hard Drive for a measly $99.95.

    CLEARANCE SALE! You've read about it on the news, now you can get one for yourself. Hillary's Hard Drive. 100% genuine erased clean email server. Buyer beware, this product has had heavy use and it currently is no longer working, but that doesn't mean it's not valuable to someone. Anyone?

    Limited edition. We have 80 of these and when they're gone, they're gone forever.

  • The best twitter-sized summary of Hillary's campaign "relaunch" event:

    As an additional echo of the 1930s, the event was held on Roosevelt Island, named after FDR.

  • Marco Rubio wasted no time in rebuttal:

    As a number of others pointed out: Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, and Bobby Jindal are actually younger than the song "Yesterday", which was first recorded exactly 50 years ago today.

    Did any of the 1964 candidates try to make a point by referring to songs from 1914? Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral, anyone?

  • Did Martin O'Malley tax the rain when he was governor of Maryland? Nay, says Media Matters for America; that's a "bogus conservative media talking point."

    Conservative media responds:

    If you want to be technical about it, it taxed any impervious surfaces on which rain falls. Defenders prefer to call it a ‘stormwater fee’, but that’s another way of saying rain tax.

    I love semantic quibbles, don't you?

  • In phony news, Jeb Bush visited Europe, and seems to have made it back gaffe-free, dashing the hopes of mainstream media.

    Well, except for MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, who claimed to detect an "Awkward stumble for Jeb Bush in Poland". What was it? Well, Jeb met with Radoslaw "Radek" Sikorski, who recently resigned his post, roughly equivalent to the US's Speaker of the House.

    Why did Sikorski resign? Well, he was among the Polish pols secretly recorded at a "fancy Warsaw restaurant" making off the cuff remarks. Including:

    Sikorski called Poland’s alliance with the United States “bull—-” and “worthless” before comparing the relationship to oral sex.

    So Maddow (as near as I can tell, alone among commentators) found Jeb's meeting with Sikorski to be a "flub". [She ignores, of course, that Sikorski was criticizing recent American foreign policy, under the dreadful stewardship of Obama/Clinton. Maddow elides that context, claiming that Sikorski was trashing the US in general.]

    Or at least I think that was her point, because I had to wade through an amazing amount of Maddow's shtick and folderol before she even got around to making this point. And I bailed about halfway through. I don't understand how people have the patience to endure such a low signal-to-noise ratio.

    Not necessarily a partisan issue; I don't listen to Maddow's counterparts on "my" side either. Not even John Stossel, who I like.


Last Modified 2019-01-08 2:18 PM EDT