loonies of the wazoo

Do you remember Edgar Maddison Welch? He was the guy who was such a devout believer in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory - the one that said that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex-trafficing ring from the basement of a DC pizza parlor - that one day about four years ago he single-handedly invaded the pizza parlor with a semi-automatic rifle and fired off a few shots, only to discover that they didn't even have a basement. He was hauled off by police and apologized for his foolishness at his sentencing.

What gets me is what must have been going through this guy's mind. Not only did he entirely accept the batsht theory that John Podesta's e-mails ordering pizzas were code words for pedophilia, but that the conspiracy was so open and easily findable that one guy with an assault rifle could blow the whole thing wide open. One is stunned at how complicit he must have imagined the DC police, the FBI, and the entire government apparatus supporting them to be in order not to have easily uncovered and exposed this.

So now meet Mark Aguirre, a Houston PI and ex-cop who's been similarly convinced by the equally imaginary stories of mass Democratic ballot stuffing. Hired by a group of similar nuts, he focused on one guy with a small cargo truck whom he was convinced was carrying around 750,000 fraudulent ballots. (And it would have taken nearly that many to turn Texas blue, by the way.) A team of PIs apparently tracked this guy for weeks - how long would it take for him to deliver a load of ballots? - and eventually Aguirre forced his truck off the side of the road and pulled a gun on him.

Only to find that he was an air-conditioner installer and that his truck was full of air-conditioner parts.

Did that abash the conspiracy theorists? No, they figure their harassment stopped the fraud. They remind me of the legendary guy who banged a tablespoon against a frying pan to get the elephant out from under the chair. But, you say, there is no elephant under the chair. "See?" he says. "It's working!"

Oh, and why is Aguirre an ex-cop? Because his way of dealing with reports of street racing in a Kmart parking lot was by leading a police raid there one evening and trying to arrest everybody in the lot, about 300 people, including all those just doing their shopping, and the ones going to the restaurants next door too. That's what turned him from a cop into an ex-cop.

"I just hope you're a patriot," Aguirre said to the cop who arrested him. I hope so too, but that word does not mean what Aguirre thinks it means.