Ah, it’s the most wonderful time of the year! No doubt you’re enjoying your frantic doomscrolling, your increasingly nuanced opinions on individual pollsters, and the mocking striptease of the calendar, peeling off those last few pages, as we await our fate. I’ll cut you a deal: read my blog and you’ll wind up, if nothing else, five minutes closer to Tuesday.

Because the demented carousel never stops, no sooner had I posted my last rant than news broke of Shart Garfunkel abandoning a flock of loyal fans to freeze to death in the cruel Nebraska night, without so much as a Dixie cup full of Kool-Aid to keep warm. Just in case, y’know, the symbolism has been too subtle for anyone.

Frankly, I thought the universe was already laying it on a bit thick just by sending the pandemic in the first place; surely if the audience has learned anything about Donald Trump by now, it’s that he’s a sociopath who would shove you into a wood chipper for a nickel, but no, it seems some of y’all out there are slow learners, so I guess we’re breaking this down to the Only Atticus Can Stop the Mad Dog level. We’d send him door to door, to steal your change jars and grope your daughters, but he gets colicky if he doesn’t get at least ten hours of cable news in.

Well, you don’t need me to tell you early votes keep rolling in at a historic pace. When I started this draft, 84.6 million Americans had already voted; by the time I posted, that number was up to 86.3 million. And while yes, we expect an avalanche of white nationalist shitsacks to befoul the polls on Election Day itself, the available data so far is pretty close to everything we’d hoped for: youth turnout is through the roof, and other wings of the coalition seem to be showing up.

Republicans have resigned themselves to losing the election, though not, of course, to the corresponding ceding of power. Time for the extremist Trump/McConnell judiciary to earn their keep? So far, Marc Elias and his crack team of election lawyers have a Tony Gwynn-like batting average, though the dying, democracy-crushing wail of the regressive minority pulls off a successful corruption of the process here and there, as in Minnesota, where a Republican-dominated court decided it wouldn’t be too unforgivably activist of them to change the rules for voting less than a week before the election, so long as maybe a few thousand Democrats wind up disenfranchised.

Here at the end of the line, obviously no lie is too large for the flailing Turdmaggot campaign. You can’t blame ‘em, really; when your base is so thoroughly brainwashed that uncomfirmed internet posts incite them to erect shitty mini-Maginot Lines in their communities to fend off imaginary Busloads of Antifas™️, why not go big? Why NOT congratulate yourself for ending a pandemic that’s actually surging, overwhelming hospitals and infecting more Americans than ever before?

Why not accuse the very front-line health care professionals who’ve been risking their lives for us for months, while Donald Trump golfed and yelled at the television all day long, of over-counting coronavirus deaths for illicit personal profit?

On the flip side of this sinister denialist coin, the Let’s Mulch the Plebs Administration wishes all you peasants would just get on with dying at the rates necessary for their monstrous herd immunity “strategy” to work. Expect a second Trump term to include mandatory indoor Twister tournaments until the mass graves have met the Scott Atlas-approved acreage targets.

So you see, hosting superspreader hate rallies all over the country isn’t mere murderous recklessness, but a two birds/one stone kinda thing, and at the risk of earning a spittle-drenched SO MUCH FOR THE TOLERANT LEFT comment, MAGA Nation’s rabid voter base pursuing herd immunity while those of us in the sane majority take widely-understood precautionary measures may not be the worst thing for the country in the long run.

Because they’re not going to stop killing us any time soon. We celebrated our nine millionth COVID-19 case today; I forget, is that one paper, or jade, or should we just assume one can’t go wrong with 2020’s all-purpose gift for any occasion: a funeral shroud?

Amidst the carnage and tragedy, we’ve now heard old audio of Jared Kushner boasting about prying the reins of power away from the dastardly experts, with all their filthy science. My god, the madness of that. Like, if you were watching a Spider-Man movie, and the bad guy started monologuing about “taking the country back from the doctors,” you’d roll your eyes and change the channel.

Marsha Blackburn is getting impatient for Full Fascism to arrive, and she would like to speak to the manager, please. Honestly, what’s the good of the so-called power of a U.S. Senate seat if you aren’t allowed to bring your jackboot down upon your critics’ necks? People are saying Blackburn’s offices back in Tennessee feature moats with drawbridges that will only be lowered if you know a password that’s released to the public exclusively on 8chan, but I can neither confirm nor deny that at this time.

I see Georgia Senator David Perdue backed out of his final scheduled debate on the grounds that it would be unfair to ask him to speak from the bottom of Democratic Party candidate Jon Ossoff’s shoe, where Perdue has resided since the royal ass-whoopin’ Jon delivered in their previous encounter. Davey Boy is a racist sack of trash and I hope he loses his job next week, but I kinda see where he’s coming from here. I would not want a second helping of what Ossoff was dishing out, either.

Speaking of embattled Republican Senators humiliated into non-existence before our very eyes, if Martha McSally wasn’t Martha McSally, I’d feel sorry for her right now, but she is, so fuck her. Anyway, you can take the wages of your treason to the weekly poker game at Jeff Sessions’ place, Madame Senator-for-Now.

We were assured Brett Kavanaugh was a jurist of the highest imaginable caliber, and not the drunken, screeching yahoo he appeared to be, that his voice was so necessary on the Supreme Court that elevating his subpar ass to that bench was deemed worthy of chasing women out of the Republican Party for a generation, via the hectoring condescension of Susan Collins, and the mediocre white boy rage of one Lindsepher Olin Graham.

I bring this up because one of young Brettward’s recent opinions apparently contained such comically obvious errors that a swift public shaming led to a hastily-issued correction. Cool that a dude who the internet can effortlessly eviscerate with a casual fact-check gets to spend the rest of his life deciding what rights the rest of us schmucks get, innit?

We tend to forget about Wilbur Ross, as he is generally presumed to be napping, but it seems he’s been quietly criming throughout his tenure as Commerce Secretary, remaining on the board of a joint venture with a state-owned Chinese company for years, even while leading the Shart of the Deal’s dumbfuck, self-immolating trade war. Does this surprise anyone at this point? After Pruitt and Zinke and all the televised ritual groveling sessions that would make Stalin blush, I no longer expect the interests of the American people to even come up at the Cabinet level.

Speaking of that particular organized crime ring, Chief Thuglomat Pompeo and his odious grifter bride have also, it seems, been violating norms, ethics rules, and laws in pursuit of Mike’s ravenous, unseemly, theocrat ambition, including what I was once led to believe was the greatest sin a human being could commit, Conducting Governmente Business ‘Pon Thy Private E-mail, though of course we all understand wingnut doctrine will always adapt and evolve into Whatever Bullshit We Need the Rubes to Swallow This Time.

Ok, before we go any further, I need you to get to your fainting couch. If you don’t have a fainting couch, they’ve got ‘em on Amazon, I’m sure if you write Jeff Bezos into your will, they can have one there within an hour, ANYWAY it turns out the documents at the center of the cut-rate wannabe October surprise regarding Hunter Biden are faker than Rudy Giuliani’s new teeth. Or his patriotism.

No one is more disappointed to see this story so conclusively debunked than Tucker Carlson, who engaged in some Reed Richardsian contortions to back his way out of the promised Biden bombshell he would no longer be able to deliver. It was kinda funny to watch, until you remembered Liar Tuck’s audience doesn’t care about silly shit like logical consistency, they just want to be told who to hate. 

Lately, I’ve really grown to appreciate the pure, manic, dipshit anti-genius of Michael Caputo, who you may remember from the recent Army of Vaccine-Wielding Mall Santas story. Anyway, this time he got caught trying to hijack 265 million taxpayer dollars for reelection ads disguised as a public health campaign, featuring oodles of shiny celebrities, but not the ones who believe gay people deserve rights, because this is the Trump Administration, dammit, Where Hate Comes First™️*

Now, while we’re all focused on removing them from office, the Wad of Pubic Hair in the Corner of a Denny’s Men’s Room Administration has been quietly checking off items on their atrocity bucket list, from ending protections for grey wolves in a pathetic bit of last-minute electoral pandering, to, my God, expelling migrant children into Mexico even if they originally came from elsewhere, just throwing kids into the void without family or guidance…what sort of monsters would do such a thing? 

That’s the point of the whole unceasing fascist disinformation hurricane, of course; to overwhelm our attention span, to exhaust our capacity for outrage, so we’re too busy fighting to free children from cages to care if the Kushners are selling the nation’s foreign policy to the highest bidder, or to care about the Turkey thing, for example.

I read more news than anybody I know, and I haven’t had time to even click on the Turkey thing yet. Let’s do it now. Oh, ok. So Erdogan is buying the Dotard off (and cheaply, like always) hoping to shut down an investigation into a state-owned Turkish bank over evading U.S. sanctions on Iran. If I didn’t have a frickin’ political blog, I never would’ve even bothered to read that one, there’s simply been too much other shit to deal with.

So this is yet another story that would have been, for any of Tangerine Idi Amin’s predecessors, the single largest scandal in American history. Doesn’t even feel like major news today, does it? Corruption at that level, like some shithole nation you’d set a Michael Douglas/Kathleen Turner film in, and just…crickets.

Ok folks, that’s what I’ve got tonight. I want to thank everyone who pledged to the Kickstarter for the comic. You’ve helped make one of my oldest dreams come true, and that’s a debt a fella can’t easily repay, though I do hope you enjoy the book when it comes.

Oh, and don’t forget, I’m moving next week’s post up to Monday. I know we all have plans for Tuesday night, binging The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and whatnot. Stay safe out there, Resisters! And VOTE! By the way, the Fascist-Flushing Action Guide is still open to receive your final donations!

*Yeah, I used the ™️ gag twice in the same blog. Fuckin’ sue me.