OUR STORY TO DATE: So Donald Trump picked a fight with the Pope, Hillary Clinton grossed more for a couple of Wall Street speeches than the president earns in a year, and Jeb Bush spent $130 million to achieve exactly nothing.
Sure, it’s easy to get confused about the bizarre 2016 presidential campaign, not least because of the 23 new polls that surface every day amid the constant Babel of Beltway gasbags — “He’s up! He’s down! No, he’s back up again!”
The bottom line, however, is that every political campaign in the end boils down to the enduring words of the 18th-century wit and cleric Sydney Smith: “What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?”