12/18/2023

My Dear Friend & POTUS, JRB,

            Christmas is coming & despite baking many cookies, I am not yet in the spirit. It may be that the anticipation of Santa’s arrival at midnight on Dec 24 has been replaced with daily expectancy of a lovely surprise. So, it’s not that I lack the Christmas spirit, rather I have embraced Scrooge’s pledge to “honour Christmas in my heart & keep it all the year.”

            According to today’s WP you are “increasingly frustrated by dismal poll numbers.” My advice is to ignore the #s & do your thing. I trusted the polls in 2016 & was shaken to the core with the results of that election, so I’ve decided that polling is incredibly imprecise. The biggest problem is getting a representative sample. The “voting public” has become dramatically different from the first time you got elected & those under 50 don’t answer their phones.

            Jennifer Rubin agrees with me & in Sept she wrote in the WP that polls “gamify politics” & provided “5 reasons we should all go on a poll-free political diet for at least 6 months.”

            I hope that those who voted from 45 in 2016 are paying attention to what’s going on in Burma, so they get an idea of what a lawless state looks like. They could start by reading the piece in today’s NYT about Neo Lu who worked as a slave in an online scam operation in the Dongmei Zone. The account provides ample evidence of the  “criminal cancer of exploitation, violence & fraud that has taken root in Southeast Asia’s poorest nations” where Chinese thugs rule with impunity. If we’re not careful that kind of thing could happen here.

            The news that “15 suspected drug smugglers were killed in clash with Thai soldiers near Myanmar border” & that “Myanmar is now the world’s biggest producer of opium, overtaking Afghanistan” provide other examples of what happens when the law is no longer respected.

            I have gone on too long & must close,

            BYBS,