Trump

The hypocrisy of Donald Trump knows no bounds. But even by Trumpian standards, his Nov. 2 Executive Order demanding that "patriotic education" be taught in schools across the land is a piece of work.

“President Trump is working to better enable America’s rising generations to understand the history and principles of our Nation’s founding,” according to the EO.

Those rising generations would be aghast to learn that hardly before the ink had dried on Trump’s sanctimonious document, he was hell-bent on delegitimizing a national election in which the people of the US apparently voted him out of office.

Rather than accept the will of the people, Trump spewed lie after lie about non-existent fraud and corruption in a desperate effort to defend his “stay out of jail card.”

On Nov. 5, he railed in a breathtakingly off-the-wall speech:

"We were winning in all of the key locations by a lot, actually, and our numbers started miraculously getting whittled away… They want to find out how many votes they need and then they seem to be able to find them. They wait and wait and then they find them.”

Sorry, Donald. You do not call off a baseball game in the third inning. And you don't call an election before the votes are tallied. You were leading in some states because the legitimate mail-in votes had not yet been counted.

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale, who has had the undesirable job of watching or reading the transcripts of every Trump speech since late 2016, wrote: “I have never seen him lie more thoroughly and more egregiously than he did on Thursday evening at the White House.”

Trump’s EO is not worth the paper that it is written on. Education Week called it "heavy on PR, not curriculum." That's a cheap shot at PR.

The EO calls for educational programs to honor Constitution Day (September 17). An advisory committee will be tasked to produce a report “regarding the core principles of America’s founding and how these principles may be understood to further the blessings of liberty and promote continuing efforts to form a more perfect union.”

That is especially rich, coming from a guy out to bust that same union.

The EO says Trump is “willing to defend the legacy of our exceptional nation’s founding, along with its extraordinary founders, and protect America’s ideals and traditions.”

If there is any truth to that statement, he would commit to accepting the ultimate outcome of the election.

The peaceful transfer of power is what makes the US an exceptional country, not rewriting American history to cover up or sugarcoat our many shortfalls over the past 244 years.

Trump’s EO will find its rightful place in the Biden White House: the Oval Office wastebasket.

In the understatement of the year, the trade group of polling firms admits the results of pre-election polls did vary from the current vote results in some battleground states. Duh!

The American Association for Public Opinion Research goes on to say that when all the votes are counted, some of the hundreds of polls conducted in this election will come close to the final vote percentages, but some will not.

In defending itself, AAPOR says that's just the way things are. The issue is "how the polls collectively performed in describing he official results of the 2020 election," according to a statement posted on its website.

Stay tuned, says the AAPOR, because "it will take weeks for election officals to carefully count all early, absentee, in-person and provisional ballots."

As such, "it is premature to make sweeping judgements on the polls' overall performance before all the ballots are counted."

The AAPOR has named a 19-member task force to analyze the general election polls. It is expected to issue a report in December.

By then, AAPOR hopes that the public will have forgotten about how badly the forecasters screwed up the Biden/Trump contest.