Runnin' On Empty

     I guess this isn't MAGA time.

     Just like January 6th itself, the Ottawa trucker protest won't find a sequel. And it all started with Rand Paul last month.

     "Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights to you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates. I hope the truckers do come to America, and I hope they clog up cities," he said. And Fox "News" was off to the races, with the finish line being Washington, DC.

     Ye-e--a-ah. Here's the problem with that. Based on scientific data, and not the trucker protest in Ottawa, COVID deaths, diagnoses and hospitalizations are down. Kids are back in school, labor back in the workforce (the government created 678,000 new jobs in February, according to the BLS). That means mask mandates and even vaccine mandates are quietly being dropped all over the country.

     That's bad news if you're a querulous and captious political faction rooted in white grievance like the right wing lunatics that stormed the Capitol and got nine people killed as a result. So the convoy that began in the president's hometown of Scranton, PA got as far as Hagerstown, MD then stopped at a racing track about 70 miles from the Capitol.

     Then crunch time came. And, typical of right wing bullies when forcefully confronted, they folded. So now they're contenting themselves with literally doing circles around the Beltway like Curly Howard during one of his patented shit fits before going back to hide in the Hagerstown racing track. Amused observers on social media have actually taken to rooting for the problematic Beltway.

     The funny thing is, the forceful confrontation they're facing isn't from law enforcement or the citizenry but their own stupidity and incompetence. Many of these truckers, whose livelihood depends on following directions and getting to their destinations, have simply gotten lost (You want a viable villain for your supply chain issues, let's start with these rebels without a cause). They also didn't even make the slightest attempt of overhead budgeting and quickly ran out of diesel. The average big rig gets about 6.5 miles per gallon, which means that your typical semi passes everything but a gas station.

     Time to make convenient excuses for socialism and set up a crowdsourcing campaign to help these poor, beleaguered road warriors.

     Here's the problem with that: The most successful campaign raised about $1.5 million, which sounds like a lot of money. But it's being run by a woman named Pamela Milacek who's wanted on felony fraud charges, which makes it pretty unlikely many if any of those truckers will ever see enough of that grift to even make it back home. Not that they're ready to go. Right wing ratfucker Jacob Wohl got it into his addled head to drive to Maryland and asked some members of the convoy why they were there and to say their protest had been stalled. Which any idiot can see and Wohl is proof of that. Well, it didn't end well for Jacob and he and his partner in crime Jack Burkman were ridden out of town on a rail.

     The organizer, Brian Brase, claimed he would "escalate" his tactics. I guess to Brase, "escalation" means chickening out at the last minute and not going to DC as planned and aimlessly circling around the Beltway in what's by now the world's most ponderous NASCAR race and seeing a semi and a pickup break down at the Temple Hills and Landover exits.

     It'd be easy to laugh off these idiots as just that- Idiots.  But they're persistent idiots. They will be back and all it takes is another manufactured rumor to manufacture more right wing outrage and white grievance and another manufactured crowdsourcing campaign to fleece more right wing armchair insurrectionists.

     And, remember that sawed-off little runt I'd mentioned, Rand Paul? We need to hang this latest failure around his scrawny little neck like a rotting albatross and never let him forget that we will never forget his little stunt, this newest failed attempt at sedition by proxy.