Puppets Never See Their Strings

I’m kinda interested in what the fallout will be from Trump’s unauthorized photo op at that Arlington Green Beret gravesite.

Trump is very, very popular with the military & with veterans—a fact that largely goes unremarked upon in the mainstream press, which prefers to deluge us with stories about how rosy Kamala’s (never Harris’s) poll numbers are. No way but up, right?

I would prefer a less partisan press. One that focused on the realities of the political situation: To wit, the composition of the Electoral College currently favors Republican presidential candidates; to overcome that inherent bias, Democrats have to get at least 55% of the popular vote.

Will they on November 5?

Hard to say.

I really don’t understand how anybody can put any kind of reliance on polls—which are conducted entirely by phone, either phone call or text. Nobody I know picks up their phone when the number trying to make contact is unfamiliar. So, who exactly are those polls polling? People with no filters?

Also, if the Dems had attempted an unauthorized photo op at Arlington, I know full well the mainstream media would dismiss it as a minor mess-up: So her people forgot to read the fine print! Who cares?

I’m not entirely sure why the military ❤️LUV❤️s Trump so much. He was a flagrant draft dodger. Initially, in 2017, he did increase the DoD’s share of the national budget, but then, in 2018, in this—as in so much else—he made an abrupt about-face.

And, of course, there is his famous remark that Americans who die in foreign wars are “suckers” and “losers.”

I guess what it comes down to is that members of the military are convinced that Trump hates the same people they hate.

In the political sphere, hate is always a stronger glue than affinity.

And puppets never see their strings.

The Green Beret whose grave provided Trump with his photo op was a suicide, incidentally. That fact seems significant to me though I’m not exactly sure why.

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In other news, Iggy was such a dick yesterday I decided to uproot my crush. It wasn’t at the kudzu stage yet. It was still a guilty pleasure—like reading tabloids or watching The Real Housewives.

So, it’s back to living in a fabulous studio apartment with occasional forays down the stairs to a shared kitchen.

I shot texts out to a bunch of friends whose affection is a given—tentacles of telephonically mediated text: Long time, no… Wanna go vox? And ended up chattering for a couple of hours with Morgan & Tom respectively.

This did make me feel better!

Then in the evening, the former ER nurse with whom I exchanged phone numbers a couple of weeks ago texted: Short notice, I know. But I just won a radio contest for two tickets to hear a band at the Bla Bla Bla Winery tomorrow night. Wanna go?

Is this a date? I wondered. Because when we met those few weeks back, I thought I might have picked up ambivalent sexuality vibes from her—has adult children, was once married but now is not, and is at that age where a lot of women, no longer feeling the pressure of that heterosexual hustle, are re-evaluating their sexual preferences—

Don’t project, I chided myself sternly.

And said, Sure!

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Those two regression analyses I had to rerun are still not yielding the numbers I expected them to yield. I will rerun them one last time, and if they still misbehave, I may have to rewrite 1,000 or so Remunerative Words this morning.

UGH.