A Veteran-killing Sheriff’s Office up north, in Cascade County, got my attention after its Sheriff, Jesse Slaughter, explained how George Floyd turned him into Republican in 2021. The reason Sheriff Slaughter re-told his tale of political metamorphosis is because the County Attorney in Cascade County is ALSO a Republican now, though it doesn’t appear a dead black man in another state was the catalyst for THIS particular political transformation.
Before we get to the County Attorney’s statement, let’s skip ahead to Slaughter’s opportunity for a positive mention on the corpse of George Floyd:
Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter cheered the announcement on Thursday. The sheriff got national headlines when he ditched Democrats for the GOP in 2021, stating progressives had squandered their relationship with law enforcement in their response to the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis.
From Slaughter’s view, Great Falls, the state’s third-largest city, began voting more consistently Republican following the business restrictions and mask mandates that came with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hmmm, does this bring anything to mind?
While there’s no mention of George Floyd, the Cascade County Attorney definitely had funding cops on his mind, as reported by local media:
Racki broke the news on social media with a video denouncing the left’s embrace of the “Defund the Police” movement, which is considerably washed out of the current political lexicon but remains salient with Montana voters.
“For a long time now I’ve been feeling that way,” Racki said in a phone interview on Thursday.
The county prosecutor’s office is hardly, if ever, a political pulpit. Still, he said the move does realign him with the local community, which has trended further to the conservative side in recent election cycles.
“That was one of the reasons I did it,” Racki said. “Especially at the national level, the Democrat Party does not represent the values of Montana. And it wasn’t always that way, but it appears to be now.”
Here in Missoula, in 2018, Republican “king-makers” rallied behind Sheriff McDermott, who was still a Democrat at the time, because some bullshit about rancor being bad or something.
Isn’t that funny?
A group of high-profile Missoula Republicans on Thursday night hosted a re-election party for incumbent Missoula County Sheriff T.J. McDermott, a Democrat seeking his second term in office.
The event, which included some of the city’s top Republican king-makers, joined a handful of Democrats in promoting McDermott as the right candidate for the job, citing his experience and achievements in office.
But they also agreed on something else: The nation must move past the current rancor of public discourse and work more closely together in accepting differences of political opinion.
Ultimately T.J. McDermott’s transformation into a viable candidate for Municipal office was a failure, something I’d like to think I had a hand in delivering, which brings me to my final point, which is about poop.
Once upon a time I made marginal improvements by identifying problematic areas of Missoula where the “shelter-resistant” homeless population would literally make spaces uninhabitable, like the shit-filled alleyways where my former client, David Bishop, once lived before moving semi-permanently into the now-demolished Sleepy Inn.
Now I just document how some things never change.
There is no better image than this impressively large pile of literal shit in the alley behind Butterfly Herbs that encapsulates how I feel about BOTH political parties and the value of what what they claim to offer us, the beleaguered citizens of a rapidly devolving society.
Thanks for reading!