The Devil, A Mic, and a Can of Selzer

I suppose this will be the last of my lighthearted and snarky Election Updates for the year.

As I’m writing this, on Monday, we have about thirty hours until the polls close in the Eastern time zone, and then the candidates-earning-votes stage of the election is over and the litigation stage can begin. I don’t like that the litigation stage is now an expected November tradition, but nobody asked me.

Please refer back to my boilerplate about voting and Catholic Social Teaching: it is not a sin to vote for a candidate who supports an intrinsic evil, as long as you don’t vote for them BECAUSE you like that intrinsic evil. That’s the rule of the Catholic Church. You’re supposed to vote as your conscience directs, for the person who you think will be the very best leader or the least bad one, and neither I nor anybody else ought to spiritually abuse you about your choice.

Now,  let’s see. What was the big election news for the week?

Well, it seems that Tucker Carlson was attacked by Old Scratch.

I don’t know that this should be the thing that’s been on my mind the most, but here we are. On Halloween, Tucker Carlson announced that the had been physically mauled by a demon. And immediately, the inimitable Rod Dreher tweeted that this story was all true; he knew it because Carlson had told him about it years ago.

Carlson claims that, some time ago now, he was in bed with his wife and four dogs. While lying supine next to another human being and four apex predators, Tucker had a classic sleep paralysis episode where he felt the presence of a demon in the room. Then the demon attacked. He woke up with a start, glad it was all a dream, and that’s when he found the bloody claw marks on his body. His wife and dogs didn’t hear a thing, despite being light sleepers. Tucker concluded that he’d been visited by an evil spirit and began studying the Bible.

Let’s go over that again, shall we? Tucker was in bed with four dogs and another human. That’s a total of sixteen clawed feet plus Mrs. Tucker all in close proximity. And when he woke up with claw marks, he didn’t say “I’d better get a separate bed for my dogs,” he said “It must have been the devil!”

My personal theory of the events of that night is that Mrs. Tucker clawed him because he wouldn’t stop snoring. She then pretended to be asleep when he woke up, intending to blame the event on the dogs; she couldn’t believe her luck when he started ranting about evil spirits and she didn’t have to make an excuse.

After that fun Halloween interlude, the buildup to election day continued as expected, until Donald Trump encountered a bit of trouble with the sound equipment at his rally in Milwaukee.

Last I heard, the problem was not with the microphone itself, but with about half of the speakers in the facility, but Trump assumed it was a problem with the mic. He started ranting about assaulting the sound techs and complaining that he was going to “blow out” his arms by holding a different microphone. And then he bent to the podium and started pantomiming a sex act. There’s no video in that article link, in case you’re concerned.

I was a chaste Catholic homeschooler growing up and I went to Franciscan University, so I didn’t even recognizing what everyone was reacting to when I first saw the video of the pantomime. I thought he was just blowing into it to see if it worked, but I was living in a fool’s paradise.

I don’t know why I’m trying so hard not to say the name of what he did.

After all, I’m told that Trump is the champion of the pro-life party, the party of decency and Christianity and wholesome nuclear families. I’ve been informed more times that I can count that the real sinners are the Democrats, who might corrupt children by exposing them to sex. I’m informed I’m in mortal sin if I don’t fall in line to support the man.  I still remember mid-2016, when I was a brand new Patheos blogger, and two more famous Catholic bloggers were fired from a Catholic newspaper for using vulgarity on social media. I remember specifically that one of them was chided for referring to the original awkward-looking Trump-Pence logo as a “bl*wj*b swastika.” That was considered far too dirty a thing to say. And last weekend, in between rants about abusing stage hands, that same presidential candidate waddled up to a microphone and gave it one of those on live television. He’s yours, Republicans. Have a good time.

Sometime after the microphone episode, we got the famed Ann Selzer poll, which has been uncanny in predicting election results for quite a long time now. And the poll showed that Kamala Harris was pulling ahead of Trump in Iowa.

Instantly, the narrative we’ve been hearing all along that Trump and Harris were neck and neck evaporated. Everybody started talking as if Harris was going to win in a landslide. Even Nate Silver begrudgingly adjusted his projections to show Harris getting 270. For the first time since March or so, all the hats switched and REPUBLICANS started telling everybody that polls don’t matter. DEMOCRATS started dancing around with glee as if they’d already won. And that terrified me, because if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that the worst possible thing a Democrat can do is be confident. I haven’t been good and scared that Harris was going to lose until the pundits started celebrating. Now I’m freaking out.

I have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow night or in the coming days.

For all I know, we’ll be inaugurating President Jill Stein in January.

What I do know is, any Catholic talking head who tells you you’ve got a moral obligation to vote Republican ought to be laughed into oblivion. Vote your conscience. Vote your common sense. Vote for the one who wasn’t making love to a microphone this weekend. Or just leave the top of the ticket blank and vote for your local tax levees, if you must. But our country is in a very dangerous place right now, and you mustn’t fall in line behind the bullies.

Get out there and vote; you’ve got one day left.