Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

It's getting to be about that time in the electoral cycle, when the usual Nader-baiting groundhogs pop up from their holes to gaze at their navels and stroke their chins. The quadrennial Passion Play of the Gorestoßlegende, with its ever-rotating cast of sanctimonious characters, thunders on.

There's no debating these people, anymore than you can persuade a Drumpfkin of his folly. But the fact of the matter is that more Florida Democrats defected for Bush than for Nader in 2000. They keep overlooking this, erm, inconvenient truth (see what I did there?), and it's not hard to see why.

But if they and their gal are going to win this round of Most Important Election Evar!, they must face facts for what they are. And the cold hard truth is that the percentages of stubborn Bernie Bros and Steiniacs are miniscule in comparison to the numbers of registered Democrats who will jump on the John Miller Express. Why? Because you have a tone-deaf candidate whose best critiques of the clown still manage to smack of hypocrisy and insincerity:

In the mid-2000s, a speculative mania swallowed up the real-estate markets largely because Wall Street discovered a new (and often criminally fraudulent) way to peddle mortgage securities.

The basic trick involved big banks buying up the risky home loans of subprime borrowers -- the loans of people who often lacked verified incomes and had poor credit histories -- and repackaging them as highly rated mortgage securities.

Basically they took risky loans and presented them as somewhat safer investments to a range of investors, all of whom later got clobbered: pension funds, hedge funds, unions, even Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

This technique, of turning rancid home loans into a kind of financial hamburger and then selling it off as grade-A beef to institutional investors, created artificial demand in the real-estate markets, which in turn led to the speculative mania.

The bubble stayed inflated for a few years because a continual influx of new investors kept the old investors from losing their shirts for a while. The layman's term for this is a Ponzi scheme.

So when Donald Trump in 2006 says, "If there is a bubble burst, you could make a lot of money," he might sound crass, but he wasn't wrong. That bubble was always going to burst. Those investors who got creamed were always going to get creamed.

And the fault was with the people who drove this speculative craze by knowingly peddling bad merchandise and continually driving the markets upward. Think, for example, of Citigroup, which was selling huge masses of mortgage securities even as its traders were saying things to each other like, "We should start praying....I would not be surprised if half of these loans went down."

We know the names of many of these companies because many of them have agreed to pay huge settlements for their involvement in selling mismarked mortgage securities.

Four of them -- the aforementioned Citigroup, along with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase -- are among Hillary Clinton's top six contributors for her career.

There are not enough true purists -- on either side of the equation -- to be the deciding factor. The lefty holdouts were not going to vote for HRC anyway, despite your plaints. But the fence-sitters, the idjits who won't defect until the last minute, leaving the N8r b8rs with their collective dicks in hand once again if they're not careful, they're the ones you might want to start focusing your energy on. Because they're the ones who will actually decide whether or not we get a Preznit Assclown. So start hitting him where he lives, in his projected view of himself as a Man Of Greatness.

Really cut his ass down to size; start split-testing the nicknames "Deadbeat Donald" and "John Miller" and target each to various demographics. (For example, since the Miller/Barron identity seems to have been conjured at least in part to regale the gossip media with how much high-profile trim Fatboy was supposedly getting, you could aim that one at the female audience, especially First Wives Club types who were abandoned by ridiculous men chasing pussy half their age.) Stop listening to conventional wisdom. It's okay to fight fire with fire, but do it early and often and well. Don't do it way too late and half-assed like Rubio.

But enough with the whining about the internal squawking. Those people are not going to be your problem in October and November, and the sooner you realize it, the better off we'll all be. Know your real enemy and act accordingly.

Everything else is wasted motion; it doesn't even qualify as mental masturbation.