The Red Wave that Wasn't

 

I very carefully treated Tuesday's returns like they weren't even there until now. I wasn't posting last night. I didn't want to hear any news. I don't do prognostication on this blog for a very good, reason--there are ghosts in the machine. and I believe in them. We shouldn't listen to polls too much, because if polls were great, why would we ever have elections? And knowing very well that returns take time, and might be illusory early on, I wanted to say less and less even as some kind of picture shaped up.

But I'm now less reticent in saying--it was a good night. It was a good night especially in Pennsylvania, where Shapiro and Fetterman came through and the State House is blue. I am extremely pleased that Mastriano (1/6 attendee) lost despite the rainbow that his "prophets" thought might foretell his victory:

I mean:

During Mastriano’s speech on pronouns, he sees a rainbow and says God is sending a message pic.twitter.com/EOHc9aSuIX

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 5, 2022

No, hon, this is the sign Lesbian Jesus sends to you to tell you why you lost.  Keep up.

Dr. Oz Didn't Stumble When He Said This

 

Holy shit: Oz says his abortion position: should be between "a woman, her doctor, and local political leaders" #PASenDebate pic.twitter.com/UDiJvDYHYo

— Pat Dennis (@patdennis) October 26, 2022

I personally do not think my uterus is any place for a city council meeting, thanks! This wasn't a case of being inarticulate, this candidate is not in any way impaired, but he said this. Out loud where we all could hear.

Local political leaders, Dr. Oz says, belong in your personal business. Playing chicken with the reaper, with your mental or physical health on the line, with your future fertility and economic security on the line, your ability to take care of the children you may already have on the line, having a debate about something as personal to you as your own body and its future. Grandstanding for political points over your well-being. Appealing to local church leaders for future political support over your well-being. Appealing to right-wing donors, or even basic misogyny, over your well-being.

Transparency and the Malcontents

 

Pennsylvania Lt. Governor and Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman sat down with @DashaBurns in an exclusive interview using closed captioning.

Fetterman discussed his recovery after suffering a stroke in the primaries and his race against Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz. pic.twitter.com/0fee1cKXgY

— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) October 11, 2022

U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman gave an interview where he was forthcoming about his recovery and the limitations that he still has post-stroke, and it seems to me that a certain number of people who were previously looking for more transparency about his condition were probably actually looking for some window to indicate that he was not capable of serving in this capacity.

I may add more to this, but to be perfectly blunt--it's ableism. We have people serving in the US Senate right now who are recovering from strokes, and have had, and have had people serving in the Congress and even the presidency with other disabilities without this election. Needing some assistance to perform isn't a sign of incapacity, and I do not think the same questions would arise if a candidate was using a cane or a hearing aid. But it is still the same ableism, and some of the "takes" I am seeing on social media are, to stay blunt, in very bad faith.

That said, I can see from this and other interviews that Fetterman remains sharp and insightful, thoughtful and genuine. I can also say that I am unaware of an assistive device for someone who is profoundly ethics-impaired, as in, say, a snake-oil-dealing puppy killer.

There Was a Rally in Wilkes-Barre

 

The picture above isn't from the rally Trump held in Wilkes-Barre, PA for Doug Mastriano (insurrectionist) and Dr. Oz (snake oil salesman) but from May of this year, when it was all about the primary. Sure, Trump was already a one-term, twice impeached former president, who incited an insurrection riot and had already had 15 boxes of stuff taken from his Mar-A-Lago country club/domicile at the time. But his support was enough to boost Dr. Oz over the top in the GOP primary. 

Trump has since had a lawful search warrant served back in August to have even more classified and other documents horked out of his increasingly dodgy-seeming resort, once referred to as the "Winter White House". It might look bad, and I suspect the reason why is bad. But why would Mastriano and OZ turn down such valuable assistance? 

The Way Conspiracists Roll

 

Pretty sure when Steve Bannon calls you ‘satanic’ that means you are winning. pic.twitter.com/NHhGnNV32Y

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) August 17, 2022

Has Steve Bannon seen Steve Bannon ever? Talk about having the face one deserves after all this time! I'm not cute, but this is amazing to me--just demonize someone for being tall and Shrekish.  Steve Bannon looks like he rolls bums for new clothes. He looks like his skincare regime is to powder his face with fresh bread mold in the hopes he looks at least partially alive. He looks like he doesn't so much change shirts as lets them molder into his gelatinous form and then acquires new ones. From corpses. He is an international provocateur. 

Obviously, Steve Bannon is not the guy you want to get your opinions from.  He's a guy who doesn't think our present government is good enough and wants to have a New Federal State thing because if it's good enough for his Chinese benefactors, why not the US? And he has so many plans. So many. Stupid. Plans. 

Fetterman looks like me, and my generation. We aren't cute and we are tattooed, and we serve dreams we don't even know if we will accomplish. We believe in people, not cults, not ideologies. We are trying. We are sometimes failing. But we are not here to be your demon just because we ain't cute. 

Bannon and Trump look like syphilis and herpes made a baby and they both are dreadfully afflicted by their poxy-ass son. 

I know what the polls say, but you know what? Until my man Fetterman literally wins I feel restless. I know he will. But I want PA GOP wreck'd. They deserve it. 

Discrimination Hits my Hometown

Monday morning, apparently, some jerk in a red pick-up truck bowled a pig's head onto the steps of the Al-Aqsa Academy mosque in my very own hometown. It's pretty clearly symbolic--pork is not halal but haram. So this act was using a little bit of knowledge about Islamic tradition to try to defile a mosque. It was pretty disgusting, but it is only mildly intimidating--still, I think this is a bad sign regarding what utter irresponsible bullshit is going around in the presidential race.

Mayor Nutter, who is about as mild-mannered and cool a cat as you can find, referred to Donald Trump just recently as an asshole. He isn't wrong--in fact I admire his restraint in not referring to him with Charles Pierce's winning sobriquet of "ambulatory pilonidal cyst". (I think one of them kept Rush Limbaugh out of 'Nam. Thus, good for exactly nothing, ever.) My man for the PA Senate race, John Fetterman, called Trump a jagoff. Yup. This, too, sounds about right.

See, leadership is a funny old thing. You can lead bigoted asshats to support your mouthy hide by yapping it up, but at the end of the day, you are responsible for the permission slips you went and wrote to all the delinquent-ass SOB's who took the perfectly generic insinuations you made and then decided to hit up actual people and threaten them, personally. And if you do not understand or accept that responsibility--you are not any kind of real leader, because in the real world, words mean things and policies have consequences.