I was mostly disengaged from politics over the weekend — we drove up to Hood River, OR to see a friend’s band, who turned out to be quite good! Shout-out to Rod and co. and also to opening act the Little Hexes, who treated us to a faithful yet quirky cover of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” to kick off the evening.

I did catch a few references online to That Fucking Guy’s rally at Madison Square Garden, which even the NYT — so careful about everything this election cycle — called “a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism,” explaining:

A comic kicked off the rally by dismissing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” then mocked Hispanics as failing to use birth control, Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers, and called out a Black man in the audience with a reference to watermelon.

Buzz today indicates that there may actually be repercussions for this, for once. There are many Americans of proud Puerto Rican heritage and more of them may vote now.

It’s good news too that the Times, which has been the avatar of squishy middle-of-the-road coverage all year, is finally starting to get saucy about this election. Look at this screenshot of today’s home page:

They say no one has ever gone broke underestimating the taste of the American public, but it seems like the MAGAs may have overestimated its general hatefulness. There just aren’t that many Nazi or Nazi-adjacent voters — though I guess there were enough to fill MSG, more or less — and all of them were voting for TFG anyway. All the people they’re driving away with the ugliness have to amount to something, right? And maybe a few of the rally attendees went home with a sour taste in their stomachs and are reevaluating their choices today. Probably that’s giving them too much credit but I’m an optimist.

8 days out, cautious optimism is the vibe. I’m feelin’ it, are you feelin’ it?

And this is not drug-induced, this is real.