Season of mists

 

This is Mischief Night (your local name may vary) when people, usually adolescents, commit acts of varying degrees of atrocity in anticipation of Halloween.  Egging houses is probably too expensive due to inflation, same with decorating your neighbor's trees with toilet paper.  You might want to break into the home of an elderly man and fracture his skull with a hammer, but it's been done.

At least half the country is appalled at the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi, while about forty percent seem to find it either funny or grounds for political commentary.  (There's always about five percent who have no opinion.)  In the second group we find Ministry of Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes:

Keep your day job as long as it lasts, Dev, you have a limited future in comedy.  Jesse Watters and Gutfeld! have nailed down the hatelaugh audience.

Nunes's "clothes on" witticism refers to a report, since rescinded, that David DePape was in his underwear when arrested because he was there to have sex with Pelosi.  A local "speaker and investigative journalist" named Joe Eskanazi, who has sources, decided to embellish this by calling DePape "a former Castro nudist protester," presumably a reference to the San Francisco neighborhood (with a significant LGBTQ population) and not the former Cuban leaders.  It could be true -- it looks like DePape was all over the place politically before discovering QAnon and covid conspiracies.  Coupled with "false flag" and "meant to make the right look bad," I'm sure we'll hear a lot more of this.  The slightly less mad explanation is whaddaya expect when you demonize the police just because a couple dozen Black people get shot or strangled or tased to death every year, why don't they just get out of bed and comply?  I did say slightly.  

No doubt there's an even lower stratum of "conservative" thought that Pelosi had it coming and his wife (who isn't a real Catholic according to religious arbiter Tucker Carlson) doubly so and their daughter who didn't mourn when a neighbor kicked Rand Paul's ass and, well, just about any other traitor to Trump including Liz Cheney and Mike Pence.  I can just about hear them down there, I don't feel the need to go and look.  But Bill Maher does.  Bill Maher knows why the right is so angry and violent -- we don't listen to them.  They have so many valid ideas about how Anthony Fauci and his family deserve punishment, and how corporations that won't give money to Republicans should be investigated, and how Hillary Clinton has been dead since 2016.  And it's not enough to believe these things and share them on podcasts and social media, they have a Constitutional Right to make everyone listen.  Anything less assaults their freedom, just as Mike Pence's religious freedom is under attack because we don't want to hear his interpretations of the Old Testament night and day.  It's.  Our.  Fault.

Fortunately the rabid have a new friend at Twitter.  Elon Musk used his new toy to spread an article on the male prostitute angle with the giggly comment, "There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye."  Yes, there is.  It means that Twitter is now a complete tool of Trumpanzee disinformation and racial hatred.  Already LeBron James has called on Musk to do something about the spike in uses of "n-----" on his platform, up 500 percent in just twelve hours.  As people like Shonda Rhimes close their accounts, it will only get worse.  Musk insists the policy on hate speech remains in effect and that he is forming a "content moderation council," sort of like the local politicians who will decide on abortions in Pennsylvania if Oz has his way.  What can go wrong?

Joe Biden:  "Enough is enough is enough.  Every person of good conscience needs to clearly and unambiguously stand up against the violence in our politics, regardless of what your politics are."

Christine Drazan, Republican candidate for governor of Oregon, is campaigning with right-wing militia leader B.J. Soper, who calls central Oregon a "redoubt" under assault from socialists and communists.  All her money comes from January 6 coup bankrollers.

Trump-appointed Judge Michael Liburdi sees nothing wrong with storm troopers menacing voters at drop boxes in Arizona.  

Conservation Voters New Mexico, an environmentalist group, received an anonymous letter containing a toxic substance and antisemitic symbols.  The letter also threatened the state Democratic Party and Rep. Nathan Small.

The FBI is investigating more than a thousand threats to election officials, mostly in rural areas.

Because Trumpanzees gibber and howl and fling their feces at Dominion machines, Nye County, Nevada, is hand-counting ballots in the presence of armed kibitzers and random nutters. It's going as well as you would expect.

I almost wish Joe Biden would declare a state of emergency and cancel the election.  I just want to watch Tucker Carlson implode like a Philco TV. 

We can't even enjoy the death-glories of autumn anymore.