Many of you long-haulers here at the Salon remember my cousin, Jesus Hachecristo. He’s always got some kind of scam going. For awhile, he went by the name of “Caddo Joe” and pretended to be a tribal fishing guide on Toledo Bend. According to history, the Spanish encountered the Caddo 400 years ago and asked, “Where the hell are we? And which way to the city of gold?” They interpreted the word ”tejas” as the name of the where, but it really meant “friend,” according to Texas, which is well-known to be the friendliest place on earth to immigrants. According to Caddo Joe, it actually meant, “Who are you assholes?” which is why he didn’t last long as a Texas fishing guide.

Back when Hurricane Harvey Hit Houston Hard, Jesus was amazed to learn that Joel Osteen, plasticized pastor, had a mansion, a kachillion dollars, and enough cars to start his own luxury dealership. He did this by following the gospel, which says, “Sell all you have, give to the poor and follow me.”  That doesn’t apply to him, you understand, but to his followers. In this transactional sort of grace, Joel is the salaried middleman, who collects a pretty hefty skim off the top before the poor see so much as a widow’s mite.

But when those poor, up to their hips in Harvey water, came knocking at Joel’s megachurch for a dry place not to drown, he treated them like Noah’s neighbors and pretended no one was home at the ark.

“Primo, how can I get into this?” an excited Jesus asked. He has suspended drivers’ licenses in about 18 states and thought one car for each would be pretty cool.

I suggested he study how the competition did it, and emulate them. So, one Sunday, we toddled on down to the Compaq Center, dba Lakewood Megachurch and Mint, where Jesus asked a security dude in khakis and a golf shirt where the guest-pastor section was.

The dude looked us up and down and said, “Say, aren’t you Caddo Joe?”

Which is how we ended up in an old mall-anchor Sears store now occupied by “The Power and The Glory Megachurch.” Luckily, the security dude we ran into there was a bowler, and while there was no guest-pastor section, we were given a seat in the Craftsman section, in the back, near the doors, which is always a good place to be when you’re out with Jesus.

The house band was pretty shitty; the Heavenly Host Dancers were okay, but their robes mostly hid the spastic Riverdance moves they made, dancing on cue like the Holy Spirit had just smitten their basal ganglia. Then the headliner, Reverend Will O’Creak, took the stage like a rock star.

Sporting a natty grey suit, Pastor O’Creak looked like an accountant but spoke like a country song, which I pointed out to Jesus was the basic skillset for preachers. He began with a loud verbal flourish, like a title.

“The Spanish Armotta!” – by which he meant “Armada” – was a vast fleet Spain had sent to give England the Montezuma Treatment, but a terrible storm and the opportunistic English Navy scattered the fleet from hell to breakfast. O’Creak gave all the power and the glory to “Owlmighty Gawd,” who sent the storm, thereby saving England to thereby save North America from the terrible fate of Spanish America:

“PreDOMINANTLY Roman Catholic!”

At this point, two scions of Catholic Spanish America, Primo Encarnación and Jesus Hachecristo, sank pretty low in their seats in the back. “I thought this was nondenominational,” he whispered. I shushed him and tried to look nondenominational.

The screed continued about how bad Catholics were, how America was chosen by Owlmighty Gawd to be the shining city, the new Jerusalem. America is Christian; Christianity is American; the Others are out to get us! But God will make us win and the pastors – wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross – would be in charge: One God to Rule Them All. And all we had to do to get in on the ground floor of world domination was Donate Right Now.

To the strains of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” khaki-clad security dudes (“marching as to war”) began passing the plates, which were actually a set of fry baskets lined in green felt, like a casino table.  We took that opportunity to escape.

Standing outside, next to one of the big mall planters, Jesus was shaken. “Primo, I don’t know if this is for me,” he said. “I don’t mind a grift,” (I rolled my eyes) “but these guys are talking about authoritarian theocracy.”

“Plus, all our family are their enemy,” I added, “for several reasons. The Salon, too.”  So, later that night, we stole the planters from the Church of the Sears & the Roebuck, and relocated them in front of the Salon, to discourage Gawd’s Owlmighty car bombs, which is how I became the Deputy Director of Homeland Security for the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon.

And which is why, to this day, there is no Jesus in Christian Nationalism.

Because, Texas, y’all.

Kristi Noem, y’all.

I saw a headline where Kristi Noem is a dog-killer and I thought, “Huh! Someone must think she’s about to become a VP candidate, to leak this dirt on her now.”  Then I read the story and saw I was almost right.

That someone is Kristi, and she ratted on her own damn self.

Kristi has come out with a campaign autobiography, as one does, every so often. In it, she talks about how she had a 14-month-old female wire-haired pointer that she “hated.” It was “untrainable,” “worthless”and “dangerous.”

So, she decided to kill her.

And, once she decided to do that, she realized she also had an un-neutered goat she “hated.” He was “mean,” “nasty,” “disgusting” and “musky.”

She decided to off him, too.

So she dragged the dog into a gravel pit and killed it with a shotgun.  Then she dragged the goat into the gravel pit, botched the hit, had to run back and get another shell, before delivering the head shot to the not-quite-mortally wounded goat.

She noticed some workers had seen her do it. But one what-are-you-gonna-do-about-it glare later, and they prudently turned away. So the body count stayed at two, none human.

In any other America, this would be political suicide.

But in this America, when you’re angling to become Vice Dictator, one flabby, demented, over-amped aderall snort away from the Big Chair…

She speaks of being willing to “do the unpleasant job that needed to be done” – to dispatch the worthless, the dangerous, the nasty and disgusting that she hated. The kind of labels authoritarians like to fling around about “The Other.”

That’s just the kind of someone the MAGA mob is looking for.

How do you decide whom to vote for?

I spent 25 years in politics chasing the answer to that question. And the answer is this:

You’ve already decided whom to vote for.

You’d like to pretend you haven’t. You’d like to say I’ve examined all the candidates, all the issues, the domestic needs, our foreign policy aims, the direction of science & technology, and consulted with my doctor, my lawyer, my preacher and my psychic. My mind is clear, my heart is pure and my diligence is due.

It says “Get Clean For Gene?”

The truth is, for politicos, we already know how you’re voting. We just check for your name on a number of different lists, check your voting record, and decide if you’re worth our time.

The “you” I’m speaking to is a member of a class of people that fit the “you” profile, and we can predict with pretty good accuracy whom you’re going to vote for – better than your psychic can, anyway – because we have large and growing amounts of data on everybody, and we can use data science to correlate what we know about groups of “you” with voting patterns.

This is not to say “demographics is destiny,” but rather to illustrate that the old models of elections no longer obtain: there is no vast pool of undecided patriotic Americans who can be persuaded to vote for your candidate by an objective comparison of positions, policies and personal probity.

Luke, Vote Palpatine      …It is your Destiny

Rather, since the 70s, identity politics and mass media began to widen the gulf between the two parties. This was turbo-charged when Bill Clinton’s election drove home the fact that Reaganism was a brief blip. The sheer numbers were in the Democrats’ favor (we’ve won every popular vote after 1988 but one) so Newt Gingrich et al began a scorched earth policy to convince everyone that Democrats were evil.

But they weren’t trying to coerce people to switch parties or candidates. They were trying instead to anger and frighten their voters, so that they would come out in greater numbers against the less than white, less than honest, less than moral evil Dems.

That approach has a flip side, a key flip side I didn’t understand until after 2016.  Getting out the vote (GOTV), i.e. trying to gin your voters up to touch that screen, darken that oval or punch that chad, is important, but at the same time you are also trying to ruin your opponent’s GOTV by depressing their voters to just do nothing.

This phenomenon is called Negative Partisanship. Your vote is no longer a positive step towards seeing your policy initiatives thrive (really, was it ever?) but rather a veto of the other side because of who they are and what they represent. Elections now turn on who stays home because their candidate is unpalatable, yet they’d never ever vote for the dark side.

Nooo, I’m Ridin’ with Mothma!

Negative partisanship is how we lost 2016. And why we won 2020 and why 2024 will be a Blue Tsunami.

Pay little attention to the few GOP folks who say they will vote for Biden. In 2024, the job is no longer to convince people he’s better than Trump: there’s no one convincible left. The job is to convince anti-Biden people to just stay home.

Demographics is just a road map. GOTV is destiny.

Poor Ted Cruz. Just as he is about to get a sympathy break from the revelations at this week’s “Stormy Trial,” out comes this reporting from The Houston Chronicle that he has a tax liability resulting from his podcast deal with iHeartMedia.

While Ted Cruz claims that all proceeds from advertising done during “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” his 3-times weekly podcasts over iHeartMedia airwaves go to Truth and Courage PAC, a SuperPAC devoted to his re-election, “… tax experts say Cruz may still need to report [this] income on his tax forms, even if he isn’t pocketing any cash.”

The tax laws, they say, require that this income (something around $630,000 in 2023) is taxed to the person who does the actual work. Since Ted Cruz serves as the podcast’s host, he is the one doing the actual work.

Outrage Alert: Ted Cruz did not report to the IRS any of this income that he generated.

From The Chronicle:

“It’s still going to be his income, because he’s the one who ‘earned it,'” said Brian Galle, a tax law professor at Georgetown University. “This isn’t like a charity that auctions off one hour of free accountant time or something … This was a payment for a series of appearances by Ted Cruz and not by anybody else.”

Oops.

As a ridiculous but sublime analogy, Galle compared the podcasts of Senator Cruz to a nun’s hospital work: “The arrangement is similar to a nun who works in a hospital and sends their pay back to the church because they have taken a vow of poverty. The nun is entitled to a salary for her services, even if she doesn’t collect it.”

I have to admit that hospital analogy cuts a little deep.

Nevertheless, if this is all true, and I’ll bet it is, this should undo all the sympathy heaped on Cruz over TFG’s deal with The National Enquirer to trash out Cruz’s father on its front page in 2016.

It says it right here in the Republican Handbook For 21st Century Campaigning:

“Rule 117. Sleaze cancels sleaze.”