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In the latest episode of our hit fall show, What Is The Shit, Anyway?, we find our hero, the United States of America, beset by spies, saboteurs, and ratfckers, only to be saved by one heroic —and extremely polite—office manager. From The Daily Beast:

The operative, who went by the name Monica Nelson, appears to have been Marisa Jorge, a New York-based official who has been previously exposed after embedding with other political campaigns. Justin Jones, Spanberger’s communications director, said that Nelson had been on the campaign as a volunteer for several weeks. She had shown up at the offices with the appearance of being pregnant and said she was bored at home and wanted to help out.

Pro Tip: if your operative has been "previously exposed" trying to infiltrate "other campaigns" (plural), sending her to the campaign of a former CIA officer is not the smartest play in the playbook.

Jones said that others began to suspect that Nelson was working undercover when she kept peppering junior level staff members with mundane questions about where Spanberger stood on certain policy topics. Those questions appeared designed in a way to get an answer that contradicted Spanberger’s public positions. Nelson has also emailed staffers asking to get some time along with Spanberger, saying, in part, that the candidate, a former CIA agent, was a “role model” because she was “a mother of 3 all while running for political office.” When they determined that Nelson was actually Jorge—by, among other things, asking her about her nonexistent social media presence—staffers asked her to leave. She did, Jones said. But instead of getting into a car, she walked about a half mile down a busy road and ran swiftly across traffic in order to evade campaign workers who had been walking with her to see where she would go.

Tradecraft! Run away!

The Richmond Times-Leader has video of Nelson/Jorge being politely escorted from the premises. Kudos to the Spanberger staff for not tossing her idly through a window.

Abigail Spanberger, Democratic challenger to Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va. Getty Images

Meanwhile, on CNN, there's more cool video. King ratfcker Kris Kobach, currently running for governor of Kansas while remaining the chief elections officer in the Sunflower State—where, by the way, the shebeen will be setting up shop this weekend through Election Day—got hooked up with Jeffrey Toobin, who called him out for what he is. From Law and Crime, Dan Abrams's blog:

“Kris has devoted his career to stopping black people and poor people from voting. That has been your goal for decades,” Toobin quipped.“That is an outrageous accusation,” Kobach replied, “So If you like photo ID, you are trying to stop people of color from voting. That is outrageous.”

I'm sorry, but Anderson Cooper gets two minutes in the penalty box as the third-man-in for trying to bail Kobach out. As for Kobach, he is reduced at the end to saying, "I'm glad we're having a respectful discussion," civility being the last refuge of a ratfcker, to paraphrase Dr. Johnson. I'd like to have a "respectful discussion" about who's going to give us all back the hundreds of thousands of dollars that went down the ratfcking rathole of Kobach's phony "voter integrity commission."

In our series's home base in Georgia, Republican Secretary of State/Candidate For Governor/Ratfcker Without Portfolio Brian Kemp got his ass handed to him gift-wrapped by a federal judge. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Secretary of State Brian Kemp had requested that U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May stay the injunction she issued last week while Kemp’s legal team appeals the decision regarding signature mismatches to a higher court. In an order filed late Tuesday — a week before Election Day — May said she would not do so. She wrote that granting a stay “would only cause confusion, as Secretary Kemp has already issued guidance in accordance with the injunction to county elections officials.” “The Court finds that the public interest is best served by allowing qualified absentee voters to vote and have their votes counted,” May wrote.

What an interesting concept—allowing qualified voters to vote. Signature match is one of the more subtle ratfcks in the playbook. If, like me, you have a hyphenated last name on your official records, if you somehow forget the hyphen, or if some clerk decides you've forgotten the hyphen, you get bounced from the rolls sine die.

Brian Kemp Getty Images

Kemp also has been busy finding cheap ways to duck out of a debate with Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams. Kemp decided he'd rather go hang out with El Caudillo Del Mar-A-Lago in Macon than face Abrams again and answer questions about why those rats won't fck themselves.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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