The Rooster Attended a Josh Mandel Rally So You Don't Have To
The Rooster got two questions off before security escorted me out the door.
“It would be a lot easier to assassinate a United States Senator than I would have previously guessed,” I thought as I breezed through the front door of High Street Baptist Church in Worthington and settled into a front-row pew for a Saturday afternoon soirée with Josh Mandel and Ted Cruz.
I’m too cowardly to assassinate a Senator. And if I ever did muster the courage, it’d for somebody more noteworthy than Cruz. But even with a sitting United States Senator in the building, there were no ticket checks. No ID checks. No metal detectors. I could have waltzed into the event with an arsenal hiding under my “Don’t Tread On Me” t-shirt which I bought 12 hours prior at Wal-Mart.
After all, this is America, where almost any mentally ill person can purchase a handgun capable of eliminating two cretins in a post-rally scrum. History is littered with such examples. Seems like a recipe for disaster, but that’s not my problem.
The first thing you’ll notice about High Street Baptist Church is every member of their administration is 100% American cracker::
Searing insight into the type of Jesus being worshipped in this church, even before Pastor Mainous opened with a classic story about a career criminal who bamboozled a kindly guard all those years ago.
The story has many renditions but goes something like this:
There was a man who had worked at a factory for twenty years. Every night when he left the plant, he would push a wheelbarrow full of straw to the guard at the gate.
The guard would look through the straw, and find nothing and pass the man through.
On the day of his retirement the man came to the guard as usual but without the wheelbarrow.
Having become friends over the years, the guard asked him, “Charlie, I’ve seen you walk out of here every night for twenty years. I know you’ve been stealing something. Now that you’re retired, tell me what it is. It’s driving me crazy.”
Charlie simply smiled and replied, “Okay, wheelbarrows!”
That, according to Pastor Mainous, is how our “freedoms” are being stolen from us—one wheelbarrow at a time.
According to the Internal Revenue Code, churches and religious organizations “are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”
That didn’t stop Pastor Mainous from introducing Mandel as “our next U.S. Senator” while hosting a campaign rally for him in his church.
This being America means there will be zero consequences for this pastor shirking tax laws. The House of Representatives, for example, voted in 2017 to prevent the IRS from taking action against churches engaging in this exact activity.
Mandel pretends to be the first Republican politician to weaponize churches, but it’s easy to see why he’s made the gambit: Churchgoers see their pastor as closer to God, so what better earthly vassal to decide which Christian warrior will best defend their “freedoms” against “the woke mob,” which is the politically correct term for saying brown and poor people since they can’t get away using old-fashioned slurs in public anymore.
The first thing you notice about Mandel is how short the man is. I knew he was no towering figure, but he is a pint-sized man who has come to know his way around a Denny’s menu on the campaign trail. He also smells like $20 Wal-Mart shoes.
Mandel said he was glad to speak “to the home team,” and a den of geriatrics who have already been greased for him is where a reptile like him feels most at home.
His entire spiel was devoid of policy ideas. Just peddling culture war horseshit to make his aging audience to make them more afraid of the world in which they live.
At one point he made up a story about how his buddy’s friend had a six-year-old child who participated in “Affinity Groups” at schools where her and her white classmates were ridiculed as “oppressors.”
He fear-mongered about transgender students and lied about public school allowing students to choose from “up to 50 genders.” He then stated that he believes a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl, which is the kind of stuff that draws wild applause from religious bigots who were born 1960.
“And another thing,” Mandel said, “The words ‘Separation of Church and State’ don’t exist in the Constitution!” Another round of applause from people who aren’t familiar with Article 1 of the Constitution dictating that Congress shall establish no official religion.
The main event of the afternoon was Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a man who is about as funny as one of those “clean” standup comedians that Republican voters love. His main joke is Joe Biden has dementia.
Cruz is not a dumb man. He is a Harvard-educated lawyer, and I say that as somebody who has been around long enough to know Harvard-educated lawyer can also mean “towering dumbass.” Like Mandel, Cruz delights in knocking down gullible audiences who have already been stuffed to the gills with propaganda and stripped of any critical thinking skills
“I knew a man who was driving down a country road one day,” Cruz said. “He saw a sign, ‘Free kittens! They’re Democrats!’
‘Weird,’ the man thought. He kept driving. The next day, he passed the same spot with a new sign: ‘Free kittens! They’re all Republicans!’ Ok, the man thought. He had to know what was going on. So he got out of the car and asked the kid, ‘Why were the kittens Democrats yesterday but Republicans today?’
‘Sir,’ the kid replied. ‘They’re Republicans today because they opened their eyes.’”
These are the kind of jokes usually found in emails with subject lines that look like FWD> FWD > FWD > FWD > FWD: PRAYERS NEEDED FOR ETHYL
And you know what? The audience loved it.
“More and more people are opening their eyes,” Cruz said. “And this November? It won’t be a Red Wave. It will be a tsunami.”
He’s right, of course. This November will be a bloodbath for Democrats, and guys like Cruz will be that much more powerful.
The most galling part, however, was when he noted that the Democrats had become party of the rich while the Republicans had become the party of the “working class.”
He was saying all this in a $2,000 suit jacket. The only time he sweats at work is when he absconded to Cancun while his constituents froze to death due to the state’s failed energy grid. If he has callouses on his hands they come from spending too much time jacking off to mediocre porn GIFs.
Watching the event, I pondered going back and forth between raising some sort of scene or just observing in horror. I opted on the latter, because watching these hucksters spin their cheap tricks entertains me.
I worried that after the event, Mandel and Cruz would be shuffled out the back door to their next church event in Cincinnati that evening. I was lucky that they stuck around for pictures.
I walked up to Mandel and he put his hand out, which I accepted to see if he was cold-handed like a member of the walking dead. Sadly, he felt warm enough to be alive.
“Josh, buddy, why do you think Trump didn’t endorse you?”
“I don’t know, man,” he said as he moved past me. “But we’re going to win anyway!”
I’d get to him later—or so I thought. Cruz, meanwhile, had been cornered like a sweaty carnival sideshow forced to take pictures with preening fans. I made my move.
Again, he assumed I wanted to shake his hand. He too, surprisingly, was warmer than a corpse though handshake was about as rigorous as one.
“Senator,” I said. “I agreed about everything about needing fighters like you in the Senate.”
He nodded.
“But, how are you going to stand up for We The People when you couldn’t even stand up for your wife [after Donald Trump famously called her ugly and threatened to “spill the beans” on her]?”
An associate of The Rooster caught the moment on tape:
See that tall bald man behind me looking like he’s thinking about breaking my neck? He tapped me on the shoulder and said, “It’s time for you to go.” Another, shorter but angrier partner joined him, as did a Franklin County Sheriff’s Deputy.
At that point, you have a choice to go monkey mode and get assaulted and arrested for calling Ted Cruz a sack of shit. Or you can throw your hands in the air and say, “I’m going; I’m going” before walking into the sunset knowing that you reminded Cruz tried to overturn a legitimate presidential election on behalf of a man that called his wife ugly.
That’s what pro-God, pro-Trump and pro-Gun Jesus would have done. And that’s what The Rooster did too.
THOSE WMDs. The Democrats’ losing strategy… Americans are leaving downtowns in droves… The worst boyfriend on the Upper East Side… The Thrilla in Laguna: A billionaire, his neighbors, and a war over art… How to say calm during an argument.
Shout-out to Matt McGraw, who gets a photo but no title.
hell yes, excellent work.