We’re Entering Election “Silly Season,” and It Sure Feels Especially Stupid This Year

8 min readOut on the Weekend(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)The last month or so before a national election long has been known as the Silly Season. I'm wondering when Silly Season became Stupid Season. I don't know precisely when it happened but I suspect it was sometime in 2010, when the Republican candidate for the Senate from Delaware declared she was not a witch, and the Republican candidate for the Senate from Nevada talked about paying your doctor with chickens. That was pretty strange.But the rise of the MAGA movement has made the transformation complete. The MAGA movement depends vitally on expanding Stupid Season to a year long enterprise. From The Hill:The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Thursday accused Mary Peltola of misleading a federal court in the latest filing in its lawsuit seeking to block certification of the Alaska Senate election....The DOJ’s lawsuit, initially filed last week, argues that the U.S. Senate election in Alaska will be invalid unless incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) wians amid voter confusion about a candidate with the same name as the incumbent also appearing on the ballot. “Apparently emboldened by the success of their reported plot to deceive Alaskan voters, Alaskans For Mary and the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] appear to have turned to misleading this Court,” the amended complaint filed Thursday read. The latest filing cites The New York Times’s recent report that Peltola’s campaign was directly involved in recruiting someone with the same name as her opponent, the incumbent senator."Unless we win, nobody wins" is an interesting election strategy, if you're living in Belarus. But it doesn't fly here. The Alaska Supreme Court settled this hash months ago, and a last-minute hit piece from Mother Times doesn't change that.Now, we have the continued curiosity that is the Senate race in Michigan, where Haley Stevens finally got around to endorsing Abdul El-Sayed, who beat her in the Democratic primary. However, because she's become something of a nuisance, Stevens has some ... conditions. Also from The Hill:Stevens said she accepted the invitation to appear alongside El-Sayed from [Jim] Clyburn, not from El-Sayed’s campaign. Tension emerged over a digital ad run by an outside progressive group in which a woman is grocery shopping and appears to blame Israel for high prices. El-Sayed’s campaign previously said it was not responsible for the ad. Stevens criticized the ad for “fearmongering” and told CNN on Wednesday that a lot of Michigan voters are “hurt” and “confused,” calling on El-Sayed to denounce the ad.In her statement Friday, she again criticized her former primary opponent for not condemning the ad more forcefully, calling on the Democratic nominee to get “Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford.” “The ad did not invent its argument; it dramatized one Dr. El-Sayed has made in his own words throughout this campaign: that Israel is the reason Michigan cannot afford schools, healthcare, and child care,” Stevens said. “I therefore expect him to apologize for those statements as well.”Jesus H. Christ in a Green Room, lady, get over it.Not to be confused with the Stupid Wall, the Stupid Ballroom, the Stupid Plaza, and the Stupid Ballroom, the Stupid Ceremonial Arch stands alone, so to speak. So Secretary of Talking About War Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security honcho Markwayne Mullin, the only man ever named after a ricochet, had to cobble a purpose for this particular boondoggle. And it's a beaut. From Politico:Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, in court filings submitted to a federal court hearing a challenge to the project, said the 250-foot arch would be used to counter drone attacks and to serve as a base for snipers.“The Arch is a generational national defense opportunity to mitigate these evolving threats,” Hegseth said. “It will be utilized as a dual-purpose structure: a major national monument that also incorporates military utility to support Homeland defense.” Mullin said the Secret Service would be able to use the monument to enhance security for senior government officials through increased monitoring.They went to court with this nonsense late Friday. A Vietnam veterans group claimed that the administration misled it into an endorsement. (I am shocked, SHOCKED!) Oh, come on. The purpose of the Stupid Arch is to celebrate the president's delusions of his own grandeur, a tribute to crippling tariffs, shooting citizens in the street, an ill-considered war, and repeated compliments to a Senate candidate's hindquarters. Let's not mistake it for a 250-foot high military deer stand.Tough times for us Trekkers. We lost Chekov and Jean-Luc Picard in the same week. Walter Koenig's death leaves William Shatner and George Takei as the last member of the core cast of The Original Series and its later movies. And Patrick Stewart, along with a distinguished career on the stage, made Picard the one true megastar of the subsequent iterations. But, for me, on television, anyway, Stewart will always be the conniving Sejanus of the brilliant production of I, Claudius, which also introduced me to the genius of Derek Jacobi. I recently found that the series is available on YouTube, so I have my non-football viewing for the weekend. And I will make it so.Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: "Voodoo" (Mem Shannon): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.Weekly Visit ro the Pathé Archive: Here, from 1966, the future King Charles III whacks it around for a few chukkas in Jamaica. Apparently, he was pretty good. History is so cool.Another day, another loss in court for your Department of Justice. And, this time, the judge made a meal of the prosecutors.A federal judge on Friday opened an investigation into whether Trump administration officials repeatedly deceived her about the president’s plans to shutter and redevelop a Washington, D.C. golf course. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ordered the investigation after weeks of increasing exasperation, as she has sought to discern when the administration began implementing a plan to close the East Potomac golf course on November 15. It’s a central question in a conservation group’s lawsuit seeking to block the renovation altogether.Reyes, a Biden appointee, said her inquiry will focus on whether the administration operated in “bad faith” throughout the litigation and whether attorneys at the Justice Department and the Interior Department prompted witnesses to omit crucial information from sworn statements to the court. The misconduct inquiry elevates the stakes in a dispute that has already drawn the fury of President Donald Trump himself, who attacked Reyes in multiple social media posts recently for her rulings in the case. Smart move, Brainiac.And the case has also forced some of the highest-ranking figures at the Departments of Justice and Interior to mobilize in defense of the president’s prized project. That effort included a motion to disqualify Reyes from the case altogether and label her biased against the administration—a charge she denied, saying her frustration was not a product of bias, but of being repeatedly misled.They're going to have to burn the DOJ building to the ground to purify it before the next administration comes to town.Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From The Guardian:Fragments of personal objects, from makeup tools and a perfume bottle to coins and a child’s necklace, have been found tucked away in a wooden wardrobe sealed off for almost 2,000 years in the ruins of Pompeii. The artifacts provide an intimate glimpse of daily life in the ancient Roman city before it was devastated by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. The wardrobe was discovered in a room of a home on Via dell’Abbondanza, which was one of the most bustling streets in Pompeii. The items inside included tweezers, a small glass perfume bottle, an incense burner and a bronze lantern.Wait. A wooden wardrobe that survives a cataclysmic volcanic eruption and remains intact for nearly 2000 years? Let's see Ikea top that.Hey, Independent. Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!Dinosaurs consumed a wide variety of foods, even preying on one another, yet fruit appeared to be entirely missing from their diets. Now, researchers have identified fossils of a toothless, turkey-sized creature with a parrot-like skull that possessed distinct anatomical traits suited specifically for eating fruit. The species, named Infernogallus jamesi, marks the first documented frugivorous dinosaur. Existing approximately 66 million years ago near the end of the Cretaceous Period, its beak and jaw structures were specifically built to crush soft vegetation and fruits. Its remains were discovered in North Dakota and Montana. Translating to "hell chicken," the name Infernogallus references both its avian traits and the Hell Creek rock formation where it was unearthed.Hell Chickens were fruitatarians? That's kind of a letdown.The creature likely consumed soft plants and fruit within a subtropical coastal floodplain. This habitat was shared alongside notorious species such as the predatory Tyrannosaurus, the three-horned Triceratops, and the heavily armored herbivore Ankylosaurus.Maybe the name was enough to keep it safe. "Watch out, little T-rex. I'm a Hell Chicken on your trail."Naw.I’ll be back on Tuesday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought forall the victims of our current epidemics, including the killer countertops, and for the victims of the horrific glacial collapse and flood in Nepal, and for Rep. Max Miller's wife and child, and for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the victims of ICE violence, and the Epstein victims, and Eric Swalwell's victims, and the victims of the storms in Hawaii, and the victims of the Canadian wildfires, and also the ones in Spain, and the victims of the floods in Missouri, and the victims of the heat domes, and those affected around the world by wildfires, and the victims of the Venezuelan earthquake, and for the victims of the earthquake in Japan, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and for the families of the victims of the mosque shooting in San Diego, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the victims and their families of the shootings in Wilmington, Delaware and Kansas City, and for the families and victims of the mass shooting in Midland, Texas, and for the brilliant journalists of the Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont, and for all the people recovering from Hurricane Isaiah, and the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and the flooded areas of Nepal, and for the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and in Georgia, and for the people affected by the tornados in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius, the plague outbreak in Siberia, the Ebola outbreak in the DRC, the outbreaks of measles, the Hegseth Flu down in Texas, the explosive diarrhea bug, and the Legionnaire's disease outbreak in Harlem, and the victims of the heat wave in Europe, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they're getting.