Bad Air

It's a few weeks before Thanksgiving and temperatures are hovering near 70 degrees. The foliage is hanging on for dear life, but at its peak it was spectacular this year. As good as I can remember it. It's impossible to make sense of out NEPA weather, so I've stopped trying. We can just enjoy this stretch, because we're liable to get hit with a cataclysmic blizzard next week.

This weekend we voluntarily vault ourselves into darkness via daylight savings time, a practice that nobody seems to understand and everybody seems to scream about, to no avail. Leaving work in darkness is a singularly depressing thing, although little kids standing in the pitch black waiting for the school bus might be even worse. Since I have largely given up on humans, toiling in even more darkness doesn't really bother me. It helps with the Christmas decorations and stuff like that. It gives people more reason to stay home, where they can do less damage. Today I read two distinct articles about it, one touting that it's bad for me, and one giving all sorts of reasons why it's good for me. It's yet another section of American life that everybody just makes up shit about as they go along.

On the plus side, it does signal a merciful end mid-term election season, a ghastly few months of non-stop ads touting so many blatant lies that fact checkers have thrown up their hands and, as Bluto suggested all those years ago when Flounder's car was totalled, started drinking heavily. Not that facts matter anymore, or can even be recognized. Our nation has dumbed itself down so much that Herschel Walker, a "pro-life" candidate on a first name basis with every abortion clinic employee in Georgia, is about to become a United States Senator.

It's no secret where my loyalties lie, and the fact that I have to be subjected to Dr Oz and Jim Bognet on a nightly basis should entitle me to compensation. And then when the Mastriano ads started hitting.....it felt like I'd entered an alternate universe of cruel dumb-fuckery. Taken as a trio, these guys are a terrifying reminder of how your father's republican party exists only the in the twinkling eyes of old men who still remember the war, and how these men became dead inside when their party was hijacked by a reality TV star with the IQ of a potted plant.

Mastriano is such a whack job that even my hard-core Trump friends act like somebody farted when his name comes up. His opponent is actually running those "I'm a different KIND of Democrat" ads, which is what pseudo-Democrats say when they don't want to go through the hassle of changing parties. He'll win easily....but Cartwright and Fetterman are gonna have a much harder time of it.

I've always been a Fetterman fan. I love his hoodies, for one thing. I like that he just came out and said "make weed legal" and didn't give a shit how that played. He's a brave guy for being out there at all after his stroke. He's been putting up with a ton of shit from right wing shitheads, which includes a large majority of political journalists who have apparently never heard of WebMD. Whatever. Some guy said he didn't care if Fetterman had to use fucking morse code to communicate, he would still vote for him over Oz....a crazed quack from New Jersey who makes Dr Phil look like Sigmund Freud.

Oz is all Oprah Winfrey's fault....and she should be cancelled over this.

I don't know much about Cartwright other than he's been there forever and Bognet is the other choice. That's enough for me, and it should be enough for any women who don't want Bognet diving head-first into their uterus. I also know, thanks to the most annoying political ad in history, that Cartwright has "voted with Biden 100% of the time". This absolutely adorable fact coming from a party that has tickled Donald Trump's balls for 6 years. The ad is an absolute homerun for stupid people, who are obviously its target. It's the perfect example of how terrifying democracy is in an age of Talkback 16.

Fetterman is exactly what Democrats SAY they want more of, and then they see him stumble in a single debate due to complications from a recent stroke, and they end up staying home. Why? Because Democrats search for reasons to be miserable. In 2016 they stayed home in fucking droves, forsaking a historic women's candidate for one who bragged about assaulting women. What we're left with is being called "radicals" for wanting things such as free health care, while the other side gets a pass for attempting to assassinate the Speaker of the House, and settling for bashing her husband's head in with a hammer because.....well....Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory will think of something. They are the king and queen of whataboutisms.

Republicans, on the other hand will listen to Herschel Walker say this...

“So what we do is we’re going to put, from the ‘Green New Deal,’ millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. So all of a sudden China and India ain’t putting nothing in there – cleaning that situation up. So all with that bad air, it’s still there. But since we don’t control the air, our good air decide to float over to China, bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. And now we’ve got to clean that back up.”

....and his poll numbers GO UP.

We're doomed.

In a bit...

--tf