I'm assuming Mark Cuban hasn't spent much time following Republican politics.
The Dallas Mavericks owner and "Shark Tank" star put Republicans on blast in a blog post this Tuesday, and there was no pussyfooting involved. Here's how he set the tone: "I am so ready for the Mavs' season to start. Until then the sport of the day is politics. Today's game is trashing the Republican Party."
Cuban's never been accused of being a subtle fellow.
So what's his major beef with the GOP? Conformity.
It's not that the self-made billionaire is all that opposed to the Republican Party. He actually says he wants to be a Republican: "I want smaller government. I want smarter government." His only policy break with the GOP, he says, is related to social issues - though he doesn't specify which ones, or how he differs.
For Cuban, it all comes down to the perceived enforcement of rigid ideological orthodoxy. That "if you don't agree with every platform of the party you [are] called a RINO."
I think It's worth pausing here to note that with this criticism of the GOP, Cuban is not inferring that Democrats are any less demanding when it comes to following party dogma. It's that he really wants to join the Republican club, but he thinks they've got some overly strict admissions requirements.
But the thing that Cuban is missing - as well as other Americans who enjoy painting with broad brush strokes - is that no one has the market cornered on what it means to be a Republican. It's a fairly relative term.
Sure, the RNC has its official party platform and Fox News skews toward the establishment brand of the GOP, but if we've learned anything by watching right-wing politics since 2009, it's that the Republican Party (the largest vehicle for conservatism) is a battleground of ideas.
Maybe no one's told Cuban it's not 2008 anymore.
It seems the ire driving Cuban's blog post, which can be found in its entirety on the Dallas Morning News website, was propelled by what he saw as a lack of leadership on display during last Thursday's Republican presidential debates - that, according to him, the candidates were all too willing to safely fit themselves into a Reaganesque mold to gain the approval of a supposedly monolithic GOP mindset.
Did he watch the same debates everyone else did?
I'm pretty sure Rand Paul and Chris Christie had an intense exchange over the role of the Fourth Amendment. I'm pretty sure Jeb Bush was pushed to explain his stance on standardized school curriculums. I'm pretty sure Marco Rubio had a more detailed response about immigration policy than Donald Trump's neanderthalic "build a wall to keep illegals out" cure-all.
There was even a candidate onstage defending Medicaid expansion!
I'm still looking for the conformity here.
Of course there are some shared similarities between the candidates: preferences for less government, less regulation, lower taxes, federalism, etc. That's what makes them Republicans, after all. However, there is plenty of disagreement over a host of issues.
Don't try to tell me that a John Kasich presidency would be identical to a Rand Paul presidency. Not even close.
Cuban ends his blog post with what I'm sure to his mind was a great zinger: "Until things change, I'll sit in the middle and think for myself. Unlike the Republicans."
That's cute, but what Cuban doesn't realize is that he's bought into the most basic of assumptions that people who don't really follow Republican politics make about the party - that the overarching Fox News take on the GOP is the be-all and end-all for the right.
Someone needs to break it to the guy that, contrary to his glowing self-appraisal, he really hasn't done all that much thinking, and that by not doing his homework, he's proved that he's the real conformist.
David Allen Martin is a syndicated columnist who writes from Chattanooga. You can email him at davidallenmartin423@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @DMart423.