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On bullshit

April 29, 2023 Luther M. Siler

I was, for reasons that I can’t quite reconstruct at the moment, looking through my blog for everything I’ve ever written about Joe Biden the other day, and then this tweet came across my feed:

President Biden’s job approval average for his recently completed ninth quarter in office is just 39.7%. Only Ronald Reagan in early 1983 had a lower ninth-quarter average among elected post-World War II presidents. (Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup) Details: https://t.co/35JH3LMpdV pic.twitter.com/wylyTb8OmE
— Opinion Today (@OpinionToday) April 28, 2023

This irritated me at the time, and I snarked at the tweet, and for some reason it’s still on my mind a couple of days later so I’m going to piss on it again. This chart is bullshit, orchestrated by a media that is absolutely desperate to manufacture some drama about this upcoming election and whether Biden will be the nominee, which he absolutely will if he is still alive. First of all, let’s look at the actual claim: that Biden has the second-lowest “ninth quarter,” which as we all know is a super important fucking metric, of post-WWII presidents. Second-lowest? Yeah, Reagan’s was worse.

You may not be old enough to remember the 1984 election. I am, though. It looked like this:

So this is already a bullshit statistic, because the worst “ninth quarter” performance by a president since WWII led to a fucking ass-whupping in 1984 unseen since, what, fucking FDR? (EDIT: Yep. I looked it up.) Mondale won his home state and Washington DC, and he only won Minnesota by eighteen hundredths of a point. It was 49.72% to 49.54%. Less than four thousand fucking votes. A bad storm in Minneapolis that day and he’d have lost.

That’s already fucked up, but it gets worse. The next two worst results also lost, but the two after that were Clinton and Obama, both under 50%, and both of whom won reelection comfortably. And the highest approval rating on that chart is George H.W. Bush, who lost. Humiliatingly, frankly.

I’m not quite pissed enough to run the statistics and figure out how related “ninth-quarter approval” is to reelection, but that’s at least partially because it’s obviously not. OpinionToday needs to shut the entire fuck up, and I really need to kill my Twitter account.

On Ron DeSantis

November 10, 2022November 10, 2022 Luther M. Siler2 Comments

If he decides to run for President in 2024, he’s an utter fucking idiot.

I’m at my aunt’s house overnight, and CNN or MSNBC has been on for literally every second I’ve been in the house, so I’ve watched more TV in the last six hours than in the last six weeks. And there’s been a lot of chatter about the coming civil war in the Republican Party between the shitgibbon and Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis is— holy shit— only 44 years old, and he’s a moron if he runs in 2024. Why? Because assuming he hasn’t had the stroke or heart attack that he so richly deserves or been locked in jail until he dies, DeSantis will have to get past the shitgibbon to get the nomination. There is every chance that if he wins that that stupid orange bastard will keep running against him anyway just out of spite, and he’ll lose.

If he waits until 2028, he will be 50– still young. And, very likely, one of two things will have happened: either Joe Biden will have finished his second term, or the shitgibbon will have finished his. Taking up the mantle as the party’s heir apparent in 2028 makes much more sense than trying it in ‘24.

Now, of course, there’s talk that Biden won’t run again. If that happens all bets are off, but for better or for worse I don’t think it’s likely. Hell, I don’t want the guy in office anyway, and for my money the best possible result would be for DeSantis to win the ‘24 R primary and then the shitgibbon to decide to run as an independent. We’d win 45 states and it would be fucking hilarious. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is objectively stupid for him to run in 2024. Keep fucking Florida, dude.

A couple of FYIs

November 9, 2022 Luther M. Siler

I have been injecting Twitter directly into my fucking veins for roughly 24 hours now, in between games of God of War: Ragnarök and ferrying my wife and child around, and I’m at the point where I don’t even care who wins for everything else (except for Boebert Boebert must go God damn it stop teasing me) any longer because I don’t feel like I have the right to ask for much more than we’ve already got. I’m going to be out of town tomorrow night because my dad and I are running some stuff up to my aunt in Michigan, so I’ve got my shit recorded through Saturday afternoon.

I am starting to have some concerns about next week, as we get closer to the actual start date. I feel like I don’t know nearly enough about how things are supposed to work in this building and, weirdly, I can’t get anyone to send me any information. Like, I don’t even have a class schedule yet. I have asked multiple people for a staff manual and the request hasn’t even been acknowledged. It’s starting to piss me off, frankly. Help me be good at my job, please.

Anyway. Good chance of no post tomorrow, or maybe a picture or two, but I’ll be back on Friday and then the cascading anxiety disorder can take over. Excited? So am I.