Energy isn't included either. Kind of amazing they can get away with publishing an inflation stat that excludes every core household expenditure category.

there's no getting away with anything. The inflation stat "everyone" uses is preferred by economists because it is not as noisy, i.e. it has better temporal auto-correlation. However, there are all-inclusive metrics as well, and in fact those are used to compute the I-bond yield. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t01.htm

A more cynical take on this is that the remaining goods in the basket often have "adjustments" that can be made - for example, most technology gets discounted because the new version is faster (in top-line performance) than the old version. That adjustment process allows them to create a lower-noise metric, with the side effect of also creating an inflation narrative that is convenient (unless things are well and truly out of control, like they are now).

You could say that, but then you have to explain why all my commodity investments seem so terrible.

This is mostly a joke, as I don't trade commodities; however, if BLS is juking the stats year over year with some agenda or other, basic inputs should have a steeper nominal trend line than they do, noisy as it is.

Exactly. Like the infamous remark that inflation is being canceled out by faster iPads:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad-idUST...

It still has political side benefits, which is likely why economists who prefer it get funding to continue their research etc.

The "getting away with it" is that in some forms, the wealthy can say it's bad that poor people get money because "it makes inflation" but when rich people get money, it's ok, because the resulting cost increases don't show up on the CPI