Quote of the Day

"George Soros and the Obama Allies are up to their same old tricks.  They have concocted another fictitious poll that has no basis in reality, held it for ten days, and released it at the perfect time in the news cycle to help their upstart liberal candidate. This poll has zero credibility and should be ignored out of hand."
-- Jesse Benton, campaign manger for Sen. Mitch McConell (R-KY)

Okay, let's see if we can break this one down and make sense of it.

First, I suspect that most people in Kentucky have no idea who George Soros is.  I suspect most people anywhere have little idea who George Soros.  I don't even know why George Soros is part of this quote, except that he's sort of like the generic Republican version of Rudy Giuliani saying "9/11" over and over.  Republicans maybe, kind of, sort of think they're supposed to hate George Soros for some reason, so if you toss him name into the pit it might sound familiar and bad to unthinking Republicans for some reason.

Perhaps Obama Allies are -- oh, I don't know.  He's a black man and that's apparently enough in Kentucky to Republicans.  Maybe they think mentioning his name is good because he won't be popular in the state, and that's good enough.  Then again, he's probably more popular there than Mitch McConnell.

Second, why releasing a poll is a "same old" Obama/Soros trick, I have no idea.  I'm not aware of them pulling such a dastardly trick as fake polls before, unless perhaps putting out a poll is now considered deceptive to Republicans since facts will confused their voters.  But then, I have to assume that Mitch McConnel has himself sneaked out polls before, so that's a non-starter. 

And not only is it not fictitious -- it was put out by the respected PPP, after all -- it has a very substantive basis in reality:  it shows that Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes is ahead of Minority Leader McConnell by a whopping single percentage point.  (I mean, seriously, if you were going to fake a poll, wouldn't you at least want to make it outside the margin of error...?)

Third, I'm still trying to figure out why a Thursday, when the poll results were released, is considered such a "perfect" time to Team McConnell, and reason to hold for 10 days.  (Perhaps I'm missing something.  Was Thursday the day when all James Bond villains hatched their nefarious world-domination plots?)  But then, even it was a swell time to release the poll, and it was being manipulated by George Soros and the Obama Allies (which sounds like a bad pop group from the '60s), doesn't it only make sense to release it when it most helps your candidate?  Perhaps another reason it was released on Thursday is because Ms. Lundergram Grimes hadn't announced as a candidate yet, and didn't do so until the previous Tuesday.  Perhaps it was released on Thursday because that was the first of the month.

As for Alison Lundergan Grimes being an "upstart," it's worth noting that she is...well, Kentucky's sitting Secretary of State!  How dare the whippersnapper.  But maybe all that they means is that she's one of the womenfolk.

It's also worth noting that PPP had one of the best poll result records in the last presidential election, which sort of shoots the whole, y'know, "zero credibility" screed out of the water. 

And finally, as for the suggestion that the poll should be ignored out of hand, there are two possibilities here:  1) Mr. Benton doesn't actually believe this and knows the results are valid and important and he is lying, or 2) Mr. Benton actually does believe this, and Team McConnell are themselves going to ignore the results and will be running their campaign from behind with their collective heads in the sand.  Good luck with that.

Or -- we're just listening to a guy running around in a panic flailing his arms and yelling, "Don't look at the man behind the curtain!!"