For most of my lifetime, the liberals -- championed by the government school teachers and college professors -- have been all about politically correct speech. For most of my lifetime, I have been reprimanded for ever daring to speak my mind. Most currently, expressing my opinion is now called “flaming” but, for as long as I can remember, I have been censored from speaking anything that someone else might consider insensitive or inappropriate. It hasn’t mattered what I was trying to talk about, either. If I was trying to talk about social attitudes towards slaves two centuries ago, I would be assaulted for being a racist (whether I ever bothered to mention my own attitude or not). In discussing analysis of corporate financial statements, if I failed to say something disparaging of Exxon, or of any large corporations in general, I was loudly accused of seeking to intimidate my classmates. Holding me accountable for the possibility that someone might take offense at what I dared to say has a very dampening effect on my supposed free speech.

  And who doesn’t know that free speech has been in the latrine for years? That’s something we already have to thank John McCain for, in part -- and there is a growing chance that we are going to get to chew on even more of his ideas of freedom.  (He is no kind of Republican. The best thing I can say for John McCain is that he is not Hillary. That may have to be enough).

  What I am enjoying is the puzzlement among the political pollsters of why their polls are so wrong this cycle, and how they can’t figure it out. I can tell them and it still won’t matter. Years and years of political correctness are coming home to them. What a voter says when the pollster is standing in front of him and a few friends -- and what he/she really believes in the privacy of his/her own voting booth are proving to be two different things. There is no way that anyone is going to tell a pollster that they aren’t so sure they are ready for a President with black skin and a Muslim name. That would beg for getting attacked for being insensitive racist pig. And similary dittoing for the Hildebeast. No, the only politically correct thing to say is to bubble effusively and overenthusiastically about one or the other -- and quietly lie about the real voting. That’s the whole beauty of the secret ballot in the first place.

  No amount of coaxing or rewording the questions is going to matter. Everyone can see that coming. We have been trained in schools for many years, even if we didn't get any academics in the bargain. What someone thinks and what someone says can be very different. Once upon a time it was a sign of good manners. Now it is just a way to keep from being accused of wrong thinking. How is it, then, that these pollsters can’t figure it out? I suspect this is the fruit of years of cultivating political correctness.