Ted Cruz Not Wrong About Shutdown Strategy, Says Ted Cruz

One of the most hilarious sideshows of the great SHUTDOWNGHAZI!!!11!! has been the sight of Republicans tripping over their own dicks to spin some very unfavorable poll numbers in favorable ways. Yesterday it was pre-ferment sourdough starter Erick Erickson dropping some phat derp about how poll numbers showing the GOP was not getting stomped like an ant hill in the path of a four-year-old geeking out on Adderall meant the party was actually “winning” the public opinion war over the shutdown. It is unknown if Erick had yet seen the Gallup poll that gave the Republicans the lowest approval rating that either party had ever received since Gallup started polling party favorability in 1992. No doubt he would find a way to spin that positively: “Hey, we’re still more popular than Roger Goodell and scabies put together!”

Also giving poll spinning the old college try on Wednesday was Ted Cruz. Last week Ted had walked into the weekly Senate Republican lunch unaware that the menu consisted of his own ass, skinned, filleted and laid out on a platter for the rest of the caucus.

So between that lunch and this one, when he wasn’t holed up in his office writing Toy Story slashfic, Edmonton Ted commissioned his own poll from a Republican firm to show his fellow Republicans that things are not so bad. He even brought one of the partners of the firm to the lunch to help press his case.

This is hysterical for two reasons: one, since when does Ted Cruz give a flying plantain what the rest of his caucus thinks, and two, the poll showed that 46 percent of all voters blame the Republicans for the shutdown (as opposed to 39 percent who blame Democrats.) This was good news, Ted argued, because during the 1995 shutdown, 51 percent of the country blamed Republicans. And that shutdown had been over general spending issues, whereas this one is specifically about defunding Obamacare, which is somewhat unpopular, at least when you call it Obamacare.

In other words, 18 years after the last shutdown, which happened over issues completely unrelated to the big issue that led to this one during a time when the electorate was significantly less fractured and polarized than it is today, the GOP has managed to reduce the percentage of voters who hold it responsible for this kind of shitfuffle by a whole five percentage points. In a poll with a 3.5 percent margin of error. Nice going, you fucking idiots.

Of course, even though 67 percent of the respondents in Ted’s poll think Obamacare is the major cause of the shutdown, other polling has shown that a good 70 percent of voters disagree with shutting down the government over it. So awareness of a position does not equal agreement with it. No word on how Ted spun that.

Can’t wait for next week’s caucus lunch, when Ted Cruz will argue that low numbers in a poll of music fans somehow show that Gary Cherone-era Van Halen was by far the band’s most popular lineup.

[ Washington Examiner ]