Look, I didn’t expect things to be totally back to normal by now; that’s obviously not a reasonable ask. At the same time, I feel as though we all expected the promised reduction in the daily delirium levels to have kicked in by now, instead we’re still stuck in traffic ten feet outside the Mouth of Madness, and it’s not awesome. I don’t want to be that guy, but I really have to insist on speaking to a manager.

Apologies for disrupting the ceaseless champagne hangover/hair-of-the-dog cycle we’ve been trapped in for the last month, but I regret to inform you Team Decency once again emerged victorious in the 2020 presidential election, several different times since we last spoke, actually; most significantly when the Electoral College finally, formally did its thing. I’m sorry, we have to start the victory party all over. Yes, again! I don’t make the rules.

…Donald Trump does! Heh. Doddering old twit just keeps on filing new appeals, too. Maybe public humiliation on a global scale is like, addictive? I don’t think anyone in human history has experienced so much losing in front of so many people in such a short time; it’s a truly staggering achievement in the field of losing.

We’ve actually stumbled backwards into an entirely new form of drama here, one where the outcome is never, for a single passing moment, in doubt, but where you get to experience the catharsis part over and over again, like a monkey hooked up to a morphine drip, just pluggin’ away at that little button in your paw. Winning actually is exhausting, who knew?

But let’s get back to the losing side of the coin, the Republican side, because shit’s getting pretty dang weird on that side. I forget sometimes, they’re really still in their infancy as a death cult, only beginning to understand the monster they’ve become. Watching it happen in real time, here in the dying days of the Turd Reich, is…well, it’s a goddamn marvel of human psychology, is it not? I never thought I would live to see such behavior in my country.

Following the collapse of Ken Paxton’s lawsuit, which wasn’t a real lawsuit at all, but rather one corrupt politician’s desperate plea for a presidential pardon wearing a shitty, store-bought lawsuit costume, Allen West, who the Texas GOP, in their wisdom, made their Chairman, called for a second secession. Over an argument so ridiculously treasonous and treasonously ridiculous that strong cases have been made to disbar the lawyers involved.

Frankly, I’m not sure we should stop ‘em. If there’s anyone out there who would truly follow a legitimate maniac like Allen West out of the United States of America to start a new life in Dumbfuckistan, that feels like an addition by subtraction scenario to me. Give ‘em some of those wide open spaces they’re so fond of on their precious election maps.

It’s certainly been amusing, watching Republican Senators try to game out precisely how many unnecessary recounts and legal humiliations will provide sufficient cover to finally issue that mewling “Alas, my Lord, Ol’ Tricksy Joe and his deep state goblins seem to have pulled this one off, I guess it’s time at last to reluctantly accept this six-week-old truth” statement.

And now Mitch McConnell, the man who single-handedly broke American politics, is reduced to begging his gibbering nitwit caucus to pretty please stop enabling the President’s fantasy/tantrum because technically it is a coup c’mon you guys you said you wouldn’t!

They’re supposed to be our leaders, but they’ve allowed themselves to be horsewhipped into submission by a reality TV show character. In case anyone was wondering how it came to this.

Yes, tales of Republicans Losing Badly are quite diverting…right up until we remember the feral rank-and-file, anyway. You’ll never guess what went down at the so-called Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C. over the weekend WHOOPS SPOILERS it was RIGHT WING STREET VIOLENCE, how uncharacteristic of a movement that’s been lionizing a child terrorist for weeks!

Yeah, it turns out even a successful election is not an off switch, not for the kind of virulent hatred Donald Trump has unleashed. And so we watched as a lurching hate mob kicked and stabbed its way though the streets of our nation’s capital, stealing Black Lives Matter banners directly off the walls of Black churches and setting them on fire, in case of any this has been too subtle for anyone.

Howling the American President’s name all the while. It’s the Naziest thing I’ve seen since they made me watch actual footage of Hitler in school.

Quick shoutout to all those aforementioned Republican Senators, cowering in the corners of your offices in fear of mean tweets, yes, that was DESTROY THE GOP the slavering throng was chanting; the Frankenstein lesson will be administered as many times as is necessary. Anyhoo, congratulations on allowing Donald Trump to build a literal terrorist army, answerable only to him, golly I sure hope he doesn’t decide to avail himself of that power, once he’s free of all his Washington handlers, anyway, the tax cuts and judges were worth it, surely.

…but hey, the baseball team in Cleveland is changing its name, so I guess we’ll call it a draw for now, Institutional Racism. Sigh.

In the legal(ish) trenches of the Stoopid Coo, the latest strategy appears to be dressing up like official Electoral College electors and putting on little plays where everyone pretends they’re in the Electoral College, and then pretending these plays grant them some sort of legal standing. Somehow. Do you think there will be 2020 Electoral College reenactments someday?

The weekend provided an insightful little lesson on the mechanisms of Wingnut Outrage Theatre: the Wall Street Journal dug up some crusty old chauvinist to puke out an almost satirically condescending op-ed shitting on Dr. Jill Biden, that uppity broad, for having the audacity to use the title she earned through years of hard work. Following the entirely predictable (and deliberately provoked) avalanche of pushback, the editorial page gleefully published a non-apology so cynical they surely had it prepped in advance, bemoaning the thousand tyrannies of “cancel culture,” because the tree of conservative victimhood must be refreshed from time to time with the crocodile tears of mediocre white dudes.

Turns out every single person, real or fictitious, who ever told you life ain’t fair gets a Geppetto Checkmark, because high-ranking officials of the Die Plebs Die administration get to jump to the front of the vaccination line, even after leading a sinister disinformation campaign that’s claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, with no end in sight. I bet Westley and Buttercup don’t live happily ever after, either.

I’m not sure precisely how many times I’ve read the phrase “grim milestone” in 2020, but it’s been a whole fuckin’ bunch; just a natural side effect of the collision of gaslighting kakistocracy and a deadly pandemic, I suppose. The official death toll (still almost certainly an undercount) rolled past 300,000 and I have to tell you, friends, after this hell-sent year spent in a nation gone murderously mad, I will never again expect any human society to behave rationally.

Michigan Congresscreep Paul Mitchell No Not the Shampoo Guy would very much like to bask in your adulation, now that he’s chosen this moment in time, on the very brink of his retirement from national politics, to offer the meaningless-if-showy gesture of formally quitting the Republican Party. Paul spent the last four years rubber stamping every crime and atrocity, but on CNN the other day, he was so goshdarn brave n’ principled n’ truth-teller-y, you’d never know he declined the opportunity to vote for impeachment. Very brave fellow though.

Well, Redactor General William Barr has been sent to live out his days on a concentration camp upstate, where he’ll have plenty of space to run around. I confess I’m particularly curious about Bilious Bill’s next move; does one really get to settle into a nice, cushy think tank fellowship after one very publicly attempts to dismantle American democracy? Does the architect of the police state crackdown in Lafayette Square really get to spend the rest of his life antiquing, whimsically reminiscing about the glory days when he nearly made a dictator of a blithering manchild? Why has science failed to develop a catapult capable of reaching the sun?

Goddamn, this shit wears me out. Wonder how many times Joe n’ Kamala won the election while I was writing today? I’m gonna grab a beer and find out. As always, stay safe out there, Resisters…