Mark Middleton is running in the GOP primary for a north Texas congressional seat.

A couple of things make his candidacy noteworthy.  He currently faces nine charges in federal court “including assaulting, resisting or impeding police officers at January 6th attempted coup.” I recognize that’s a problem in the GOP primary only because they lost. However, if you can’t get it right at least once out of nine times, you ain’t ready to play in the major league.

There’s another situation that might need some ‘splainin’.

Middleton, and his wife Jalisa, are accused of physically struggling with police officers for more than 30 seconds outside the Capitol during the riot. Bodycam footage also allegedly captured Middleton screaming “f–k you” to the officers multiple times as he kept attempting to push through barricades.

You can read the whole story, see the federal indictment with lots of pictures, and grin away an hour or so right here.

You just can’t miss this. This is Middleton describing the day.

“We are on the front lines. We helped push down the barriers. Jalise and I got pepper sprayed, clubbed, and tear gassed,” Middleton said, according to federal court documents. “We had to retreat, but more patriots pushed forward, and they’re taking back our house. They’ve got the giant flag up on the upper terrace up there. No more fooling around! Jalise and I gotta go back to the hotel and try to recoup and change, get dry clothes on. Make America great again! Freedom!”

Wimp.  You obviously cannot win a revolution with wet clothes. (Sarcasm is just another free friendly service at the beauty salon.)

It’s that time of year yet again. Thanksgiving is over. Black Friday is over. November is over. We come to the happiest time of the year for the Fox family. They get to add up all of their cultural battles that they’ve invented inside their heads and combine them into one singular focus. It’s war on Christmas time. I know all of you have been looking forward to it.

If we take a step back we realize the hilarity of it all. If we take more steps back we realize there has been a war on Christmas for multiple generations and the wrong people are winning. Heck, I usually try not to be pessimistic in such times, but some might claim we lost a long time ago.

One of my wife’s relatives threw up a meme around Thanksgiving that said it as succinctly as I could think of. The meme said, “Only in America do we have something called Black Friday where we trample over people for stuff when just one day earlier we were talking about how thankful for the stuff we had.” Maybe I got a word wrong here or there, but that was the general sentiment.

I suppose this began innocently enough. We decorated around the house and maybe put up a few lights. Then, the competitive side kicked in. We began hiring contractors whose job it was to dangle twenty feet in the air off our roof and hang lights, decorations, and life size images of Santa Claus and reindeer. Maybe they climbed some trees to hang some of the new fangled icicle looking things.

Lost in all this exchange are the three messages of Christmas and more generic form of happy holidays. There is the pure religious significance of the day itself. It’s Jesus’ birthday. At least it is the day we choose to acknowledge as his birthday. There are all the feelings and actions that get attached to that. It’s a new beginning that goes along with the theme of a new year and a new beginning.

That brings us to the second message of the season. The term Happy Holidays is an inclusive message that generalizes the time to include other faith traditions. It also more generalizes the meaning. This is where we get the spirit of giving as the meaning of the season. Naturally, corporations love this because it means we buy stuff and religious purists hate it because while it is a positive message, it isn’t exactly the point. However, as far as messages go it is fairly benign.

Naturally, the third message is the pure unadulterated commercialism of the season. I suppose the irony is that many of the Fox talking heads and loud mouth politicians have skipped past unadulterated and just gone to adultery. That’s just an aside though as kids grow up thinking this time of year is a bonanza where they get stuff.

This line of thinking became immortalized when South Park’s Eric Cartman sang “Oh Holy Night.” He mangled the words and sang, “Jesus was born and so I get presents. Thank you Jesus for being born.” The creators have called Cartman the junk in everyone’s soul. Sadly, when the show first aired he seemed to be an extreme example of amoral behavior and character. Now, he seems much more normal. Of course, Fox doesn’t go to war with that. They would have go to war against themselves.

QFatigue.

A QAnon user named Donny Warren is suffering from massive disappointed that so many QAnon predictions aren’t coming true. And by “so many” I mean all.

Donny decided that his best option would be to write an open letter to the proper authorities complaining that they don’t seem to be doing their level best to make Q’s predictions come true. Besides Donald Trump, Donny has some others that he feels are not upholding the Q forecasts.

Warren’s letter was also addressed to President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, General Michael Flynn, John F. Kennedy Jr. “if he is still alive” or “whoever is pulling the strings.”

Truth be known, Ms. Gloria Jane Stanhope, P.T.A. president of Warren J. Harding Elementary School in New Elm, Texas, is pulling all the strings but she keeps a low profile because she also runs a Bingo Parlor on the side and does not want to attract the attention of the local constabulary.

Anyway, Donny got involved back in January with a QAnon prediction called “Red October.” It’s a now debunked claim that members of a “global cabal of elite, cannibalistic pedophiles and their enablers around the world would be apprehended in mass arrests.” You may have noticed that it didn’t happen.

Donny has a sick wife and kids so all his anxiety over cannibalistic pedophiles ain’t helping the situation none at all. Plus, he says his wife and kids think he’s crazy for believing QAnon.  That’s gotta hurt.

No word on the people camped out in Dallas waiting for JFK, Jr. Now, that there is embarrassment with a capital Q.

Ella Fitzgerald made the lyrics famous and South Carolina Republican Congresswoman (Cringe Alert!) Nancy Mace took it to stage and screen.

[Mace] was caught over the weekend telling Fox News viewers that it’s not that important to get vaccinated against COVID-19 but then telling CNN viewers that she supports the COVID-19 vaccines.

Not like a year apart but on the same damn day. No kidding. That girl can twirl!

Remember when Republicans thought flip-flopping was a bad thing? I do, and I got myself a real bad memory.

UPDATE:  She’s working on a trifecta, Honey.  Take a look at the Twitter hair pulling between Mace and Majorie Taylor Greene.  It’s junior high school all over again.

The Ahmaud Arbery case clearly shows how good our justice system could be. That’s until you actually pay attention to everything that went into that case. You had someone from law enforcement (though retired) taking the law and throwing it down on its ear.

You had a prosecutor using judgment so outrageous that they ended up being charged with a crime. You had someone filming the whole incident in what could be described as either the height of foolishness, act of real foresight, or strategy gone wrong. You had the trial itself that was anything but smooth. We obviously have high-minded ways of describing this collision of misshapen events, but the kids probably have pegged it best. They call it a “shit show.”

Yet, after all of that malarkey, justice was somehow served. The guilty parties were actually found guilty. While that explanation seems so far out of whack to Arbery’s friends and family, it is far better than the alternative up in Wisconsin. It hardly qualifies as the best of times, but in comparison I guess it will have to do.

In the background somewhere off camera is the debate over critical race theory. On the one hand, one can easily say that justice was served, so why the need to discuss race? Except we can’t avoid looking at how it was served. We can’t avoid looking at why it was served. We can’t avoid the feeling that it would very likely have not been served at all save a little stupid luck along the way. If the footage of the murder had not been captured on camera and sent to the right people it would have never been served.

Sometimes these things are captured for posterity sake and justice still isn’t served. More often than not it isn’t. When we were young, our elders taught us that character is made up of the things we do when no one is watching. Maybe we take the extra cookie or slack off at work when the supervisor is out. That’s small potatoes. If we pervert justice because we can, then do we really need a high-minded academic theory to tell us we’ve done it? Is it really that difficult to imagine it happening more often?

Most people are smart enough to take only one extra cookie from the cookie jar. They don’t raid the whole thing because that would be too obvious. Justice isn’t grotesquely biased on most occasions. That would be too obvious. We eat around at the corners until the advantage is clear. We do it so that we have plausible deniability. So yes, justice was served. It was only served because the whole world was watching. Still, there are times when even that is not enough.

Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, Jr., are dancin’ around, snorting, and giggling because they think the World Health Organization either doesn’t know the Greek alphabet or that the WTO is playing footsie with China.

The WHO has been naming coronavirus variants after Greek letters of the alphabet, believing this would “be easier and more practical to be discussed by non-scientific audiences.”

Using that system, the following variant should have been called Nu and, after that, Xi.

Well, they were afraid that Nu would get confused with New and it’s not a new virus.  Xi is a common last name in China, including the name of their leader and hasn’t Trump calling it the Shina (Trump’s weird version of pronouncing China) virus been enough?

If the WHO is this scared of the Chinese Communist Party, how can they be trusted to call them out the next time they're trying to cover up a catastrophic global pandemic? https://t.co/wURdLcdqw2

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 26, 2021

He’s creepy.