Really, kidz, is it a job requirement at Tiger Beat On The Potomac that everyone has to be a sucker, or is it just one of the perks? Is getting played by career ratfkers part of the job description?

Republican Ken Cuccinelli's chief strategist said Wednesday that the polls were worse than wrong: He believes they badly hobbled his candidate's viability and made a late comeback more difficult. "Public polling is essentially a suppression tool used to demoralize our voters and dry up money, especially the latter," Chris LaCivita told POLITICO.

Isn't it clear by now -- And wasn't it made very clear by the Romney people in their original spasm of whining at the end of the 2012 campaign? -- that "skewed polls" is now the reflexive Republican alibi du jour every time they lose an election? And that last thing there, about public polling's being "essentially a suppression tool" is a dead tell. It's now going to be the talking-point every time somebody brings up the campaign of actual voter suppression that is going on in states where Republicans control the state legislatures. And it's part of a larger pattern of propaganda aimed at discrediting in the public mind any objective analysis that might hinder the ginning up of the rubes that is now, really, all that's left of conservative politics. (It worked in 2000, when they undermined the idea of network exit polls, even though those showed -- correctly -- that Al Gore got the most votes in Florida.) It's rank propaganda, and it should be recognized as such, especially if you're going to concede later in the story that even The Cooch's folks were getting the same numbers.

The Cuccinelli campaign didn't like the numbers, so they ran their own poll around Oct. 18 - after the shutdown ended - and discovered that Cuccinelli was down 8 points among those most likely to vote. Worse, he was only winning whites by 3 points and had locked down just 57 percent of soft Republicans. These numbers persuaded the RGA to not pour much beyond the $8-plus million investment already made, still $3 million more than the committee spent on the 2009 governor's race. "Could it have been tightening in the final week? Sure, but that also sounds a lot like a convenient out," one Republican emailed. "I don't have answers yet, but the real question is whether or not we (most pollsters) were interviewing samples that were truly representative of the voters who actually turned out."

And especially if it's coming from a rank propagandist.

In multiple recent fundraising e-mails, the former Democratic governor is warning against Chris LaCivita, a Virginia GOP strategist who is best known as an adviser to the Swift Boat Veterans who targeted JohnKerry's presidential campaign in 2004.

But the sexy quote leads, and thus does arrant bullshit take wing. Bartender, a double Prestone, and see what the pundits in the back room will have.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.